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The MartAIn

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants to establish a base on Mars — but he isn’t sure its first resident will be human.

On Friday, the mercurial billionaire responded to a question on Twitter about whether a sophisticated artificial intelligence might touch down on the Red Planet before human colonists. Musk’s answer: 30 percent.

AI Overlords

Musk has a fraught relationship with the topic of AI. He’s publicly warned about the danger’s of unregulated AI, even going so far as to found the organization Open AI to encourage the development of responsible machine learning systems.

It’s such a signature issue for Musk that other tech personalities have weighed in on his claims — including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who said the notion of killer AI was “pretty irresponsible,” and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who quipped at an event earlier this month that Musk was “writing a great screenplay for a Black Mirror episode.”

Case For Optimism

But Musk also believes that AI could be made to help humankind — or that the two could even merge, ushering in a new era of evolution.

Or, as the Friday tweet shows, it seems that Musk could get on board with AI as long as it could help further his visions for the colonization of space.

Unfriended

Documents obtained by the New York Times show how the social giant’s international content moderation strategy is dictated by thousands of pages of PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets that “sometimes clumsily” tell thousands of moderators what to allow and what to delete. The revelation raises deep questions about the future of Facebook’s role in international discourse — especially in the wake of damaging revelations about how the platform allowed propaganda during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

“Facebook’s role has become so hegemonic, so monopolistic, that it has become a force unto itself,” political scientist Jasmin Mujanovic told the Times. “No one entity, especially not a for-profit venture like Facebook, should have that kind of power to influence public debate and policy.”

It’s Complicated

Facebook moderators who spoke to the Times under condition of anonymity said they felt hamstrung by the extraordinarily complex rule set, which forces them to make rapid decisions, sometimes using Google Translate, about fraught topics including terrorism and sectarian violence.

“You feel like you killed someone by not acting,” said a moderator who spoke to the paper on condition of anonymity.

The result, according to the Times, is that Facebook has become a “far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself.”

“A Lot of Mistakes”

Facebook executives pushed back against the implication that its content moderation efforts were murky or disorganized, arguing that the platform has a responsibility to moderate the content its users post and defending its efforts to do so.

“We have billions of posts every day, we’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems,” Facebook’s head of global policy management Monika Bickert told the Times. “At that scale, even if you’re 99 percent accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes.”

No More Handouts

Every unprofitable coal mine in the European Union must cease production by the first day of 2019, the date on which all public funds for the mines will come to an end. In Spain, that means that 26 coal mines are about to close up shop, according toReuters.

This move away from coal is a refreshing bit of bluntness — letting the failed remnants of a fossil fuel industry fade away — compared to how the federal government in the U.S. is grasping at anything to keep coal alive. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact the coal closures will have in the ongoing effort to curb climate change.

Always a Bigger Fish

The deadline was set back in 2010 as the EU sought to move away from fossil fuel dependence, according to Telesur. The EU wanted to end public aid to coal mines sooner, but groups from Germany — which shuttered its last coal mine earlier this month — and Spain are responsible for extending the deadline all the way to the end of 2018.

Spain has already decreased the portion of its electricity generated by coal down to about 14 percent, according toUnited Press International. And 90 percent of the coal burned in Spain is imported from Russia and Colombia anyway.

Still, the deal that Spain struck with the EU dictates that nine of the 15 coal-burning plants in Spain must close by 2020, according to Telesur. That on its own is huge news for the transition to cleaner power, and marks a clear sign that major world powers are taking their responsibility to help prevent our impending climate change catastrophe seriously.

Think Ahead

Once again in stark contrast to the U.S., where coal miners in Appalachia face a weak job market with few prospects, Spain’s socialist government — largely supported by coal mining communities — made a deal with mining union in October to ensure that displaced workers will be taken care of, according to Reuters.

About 60 percent of the people who worked in closing mines are expected to take advantage of an early retirement offer, while others have access to the 250 million euros that the government is making available to help launch new businesses or repurpose the land around the coal mines.

Late Delivery

This weekend, several of the most widely circulated newspapers in the United States found themselves the target of a cyberattack that reportedly originated on foreign soil.

Many questions about the attack remain unanswered, but one thing is certain: the media is under attack — and if something isn’t done to protect it, we could be headed toward a future in which we can’t believe anything we read.

Stop the Presses

The malware attack targeted newspaper printing plants run by The Los Angeles Times and Tribune Publishing, which owned The Los Angeles Times from April 2007 until June 2018 (and which, in a much-lampooned episode, briefly changed its name to Tronc in 2016.)

The malware prevented editors from transmitting pages of the papers to printing presses, and it delayed the scheduled printing and delivery of the Saturday editions of several newspapers, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Nobody is sure of the source of the attack, but several people with inside knowledge of Tribune told The Los Angeles Times that the attack appeared to be Ryuk ransomware. Experts have linked this software to groups in North Korea and Eastern Europe, but for now, all The Los Angeles Times has confirmed is that the attack appears to have originated from outside the U.S.

Media Under Attack

As the name implies, ransomware attacks are typically financially motivated — attackers disrupt a company’s operations and demand a ransom to end the disruption — but neither Tribune Publishing nor The Los Angeles Timeshas reported any ransom demand. An anonymous source told The Los Angeles Times that the attackers didn’t appear to steal any information either.

That means a likely motivation behind the attack was preventing newspaper readers from getting their news — and that is highly troubling.

If foreign actors are able to further cripple the U.S.’s already vulnerable newspaper industry by literally preventing the printing of newspapers, the “fake news” that dominates our social media feeds could one day overshadow the real news — and we’ve already gotten a glimpse of the disturbing impact that can have on a democracy.

No Sale

The reign of the fossil fuel-powered car may be ending.

In a report published on Sunday, several experts told the Financial Times that they believe sales of fossil fuel-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles peaked in 2018, meaning that it’s unlikely that more ICE cars will be sold in any future year— and if they’re correct, this epochal change in the auto industry could majorly benefit the environment.

Going Down

Many experts predicted at the beginning of 2018 that demand for ICE vehicles wouldn’t peak until 2022 at the earliest, according to the FT report. But a combination of several factors — including Brexit, the U.S.-China trade war, and new emissions targets in Europe — has dealt a major blow to global car sales this year.

“When you look at 2018 since the summer, new car sales in all of the important markets are going down,” Axel Schmidt, global automotive lead at Accenture, told FT. “Selling combustion engine cars to customers — this will not grow in the future.”

Even if overall car sales increase in 2019, ICE sales would likely fall thanks to the continued adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).

Road to Recovery

This might not be what ICEcar manufacturers want to hear, but it’s excellent news for the environment.

According to energy research group Wood Mackenzie, a mid-sized EV produces 67 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a comparable gasoline-powered ICE vehicle. That figure doesn’t just take into account the emissions produced while the car is in use, either — it includes emissions caused by everything from electricity generation to crude oil refinement.

In 2016, transportation was the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., so if EVs continue to replace ICE cars in this nation and others, the world could significantly cut down on the climate-destroying emissions emanating from its roadways.

Spotted

And now he’s been found. The New York Timesreports that guards are holding He in a guesthouse at his university, the Southern University of Science and Technology. It’s unclear whether the guards work for the Chinese government, the university, or another organization — but their presence is the latest sign that He’s transgressive research upset the delicate balance of the genetics research community and regulatory systems, prompting retaliation from powerful interests.

Now the Times has found that He is staying at a university guesthouse normally used to house visiting scholars, where a dozen plainclothes guards refused to identify themselves to a Times reporter. He is able to communicate over email and phone calls, according to the Times, and has corresponded with business colleagues.

“He was extremely irresponsible to the employees, partners and investors,” said Liu Chaoyu, with whom He co-founded the gene-testing company Vienomics, in an interview with the Times. Liu last saw He the day before the conference at which he disclosed the existence of the gene-edited babies. “He did not discuss anything with us before he made his announcement and we had to deal with all of it unexpectedly.”

Shock and Awe

The university and Shenzhen police both declined to comment to the Times. In fact, all employees of the university have been barred from speaking to the press, according to a message obtained by the paper.

What’s clear is that He’s unprecedented work sent shockwaves not just through the research ecosystem but through the powerful machinery of international government — and as the saga of his treatment in the wake of the announcement unfolds, it could be a roadmap to the challenges other researchers would face if they follow in his footsteps.

Greenhouse Gas

People waste a lot of food. In America alone, the National Resources Defense Council estimates that as much as 40 percent of the food people buy ends up in the trash, not to mention the perfectly-good food that never leaves the grocery store or even the farm.

Slap a Fresh Coat on it

Since people struggle to avoid wasting all that food and the market for unsightly-but-good vegetables still isn’t there, a Californian startup called Apeel Sciences developed a thin, transparent, edible coating that can keep food fresh much longer than normal, according to CNBC.

The coating, Epideel, preserves food by preventing the two main causes of spoilage. Acting as a physical barrier, Epideel blocks the water in the food from evaporating away and also blocks atmospheric oxygen from reacting with the food. Reportedly, the coating can double the shelf life of notoriously finicky foods like avocados.

Big Strides

Epideel, which is made up of fats and other compounds taken from fruits and vegetables, was designed in accordance with “Generally Recognized as Safe” U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations that allowed Apeel Sciences to circumvent the FDA’s normal approval process.Epideel-coated avocados are already on the shelves of grocery chains Kroger, Costco, and Harps Food.

Part of that success likely comes from the involvement of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated a sizable portion of the $110 million that Apeel Sciences has raised since its start back in 2012. The company has already found its way to CNBC‘s 2018 list of the top 50 disruptors, which highlights how CEO James Rogers hopes Epideel-coated foods can help feed the world’s hungry.

Power Play

On Saturday, the billionaire philanthropist released a letter detailing what he learned in 2018 and what he hopes to accomplish in 2019. One of his goals for the next year is to persuade U.S. leaders to “get into the game” of advanced nuclear energy — and the future of our environment could be riding on his success.

Nuclear Option

Nuclear energy is produced by splitting the nucleus of an atom (fission) or combining the nuclei of two atoms (fusion). Nuclear fission reactors already meet 20 percent of the U.S.’s electricity needs. But while fission doesn’t produce greenhouse gas emissions, the technology is currently less than ideal — the U.S. built most of its reactors more than 30 years ago, and they require plutonium, which isn’t exactly easily accessible. The process also produces unwanted byproducts, some of which are radioactive.

Researchers have yet to figure out a way to produce stable nuclear fusion, but they’re getting closer. If — or, hopefully, when — they do succeed, we’ll have a near-limitless source of clean energy that we can create from hydrogen, which is far more accessible than plutonium, and the only byproduct would be a small amount of helium.

Worthy Investment

According to Gates, “Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s available 24 hours a day.”

But the U.S. has been slacking off in terms of nuclear energy research in recent decades. To regain its position as a global nuclear energy leader it needs to “commit new funding, update regulations, and show investors that it’s serious,” wrote Gates.

He believes this renewed commitment will allow the nation to overcome the limitations of existing nuclear technology in a way that could significantly benefit the environment.

“The United States is uniquely suited to create these advances with its world-class scientists, entrepreneurs, and investment capital,” Gates wrote, later adding that the “world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change. Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade U.S. leaders to get into the game.”

Micro-Robots

The road workers of the future could be smaller. And a lot less human.

On Monday, the United Kingdom’s Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy announced an $8.9 million investment into a project to develop micro-robots capable of inspecting and repairing the nation’s network of underground pipes.

If successful, the project could save the country billions of dollars annually — and change how road work gets done across the globe.

Pipe Dream

According to a government press release, a team of researchers from four U.K. universities will work together to develop the micro-robots, which will each be approximately just one-centimeter long. The goal is for these bots to fly, swim, or crawl through the pipes that transport water, gas, and sewage beneath U.K. streets.

One of the researchers working on the project, the University of Sheffield’s Kirill Horoshenkov, told The Daily Telegraph that the team plans to develop two versions of the robots.

One will be an “inspection bot” that can autonomously navigate and examine the pipes using sonar technology. The other will be a “worker bot” capable of repairing pipes using cement and adhesives or cleaning them with a high-powered jet. That robot will be slightly larger and steered via remote control.

According to Horoshenkov, the bots could be ready for use within five years.

Down the Road

Each year, 1.5 million road excavations take place in the U.K., and the traffic closures and business disruptions caused by this roadwork cost the nation an estimated $6.3 billion.

That means if this $8.9 million investment in the development of micro-robots pans out the way the U.K. is hoping, it’ll soon pay for itself many times over. There’s also the possibility of other nations adopting the same or similar tech after witnessing the U.K.’s success.

As U.K. Science Minister Chris Skidmore noted in the press release, “While for now we can only dream of a world without roadworks disrupting our lives, these pipe-repairing robots herald the start of technology that could make that dream a reality in the future.”

In archaeology, the classic Maya collapse is the decline of Classic Maya civilization and the abandonment of Maya cities in the southern Maya lowlands of Mesoamerica between the 8th and 9thcenturies, at the end of the Classic Maya Period. Preclassic Maya experienced a similar collapse in the 2nd century.[citation needed]

The Classic Period of Mesoamerican chronology is generally defined as the period from 250 to 900, the last century of which is referred to as the Terminal Classic.[1] The Classic Maya collapse is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. Urban centers of the southern lowlands, among them Palenque, Copn, Tikal, and Calakmul, went into decline during the 8th and 9thcenturies and were abandoned shortly thereafter. Archaeologically, this decline is indicated by the cessation of monumental inscriptions[2] and the reduction of large-scale architectural construction at the primary urban centers of the Classic Period.[citation needed]

Although termed a collapse, it did not mark the end of the Maya civilization but rather a shift away from the Southern Lowlands as a power center; Northern Yucatn in particular prospered afterwards, although with very different artistic and architectural styles, and with much less use of monumental hieroglyphic writing. In the Post-Classic Period following the collapse, the state of Chichn Itz built an empire that briefly united much of the Maya region,[2] and centers such as Mayapn and Uxmal flourished, as did the Highland states of the K’iche’ and Kaqchikel Maya. Independent Maya civilization continued until 1697 when the Spanish conquered Nojpetn, the last independent city-state. Millions of Maya people still inhabit the Yucatn peninsula today.[3]

Because parts of Maya civilization unambiguously continued, a number of scholars strongly dislike the term collapse.[4] Regarding the proposed collapse, E. W. Andrews IV went as far as to say, “in my belief no such thing happened.”[5]

The Maya often recorded dates on monuments they built. Few dated monuments were being built circa 500 around ten per year in 514, for example. The number steadily increased to twenty per year by 672 and forty by around 750. After this, the number of dated monuments begins to falter relatively quickly, collapsing back to ten by 800 and to zero by 900. Likewise, recorded lists of kings complement this analysis. Altar Q at Copn shows a reign of kings from 426 to 763. One last king not recorded on Altar Q was Ukit Took, “Patron of Flint”, who was probably a usurper. The dynasty is believed to have collapsed entirely shortly thereafter. In Quirigua, twenty miles north of Copn, the last king Jade Sky began his rule between 895 and 900, and throughout the Maya area all kingdoms similarly fell around that time.[6]

A third piece of evidence of the progression of Maya decline, gathered by Ann Corinne Freter, Nancy Gonlin, and David Webster, uses a technique called obsidian hydration. The technique allowed them to map the spread and growth of settlements in the Copn Valley and estimate their populations. Between 400 and 450, the population was estimated at a peak of twenty-eight thousand, between 750 and 800 larger than London at the time. Population then began to steadily decline. By 900 the population had fallen to fifteen thousand, and by 1200 the population was again less than 1000.[citation needed]

Over 80 different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the Classic Maya collapse have been identified.[7] From climate change to deforestation to lack of action by Maya kings, there is no universally accepted collapse theory, although drought is gaining momentum as the leading explanation.[8]

The archaeological evidence of the Toltec intrusion into Seibal, Peten, suggests to some the theory of foreign invasion. The latest hypothesis states that the southern lowlands were invaded by a non-Maya group whose homelands were probably in the gulf coast lowlands. This invasion began in the 9thcentury and set off, within 100years, a group of events that destroyed the Classic Maya. It is believed that this invasion was somehow influenced by the Toltec people of central Mexico. However, most Mayanists do not believe that foreign invasion was the main cause of the Classic Maya collapse; they postulate that no military defeat can explain or be the cause of the protracted and complex Classic collapse process. Teotihuacan influence across the Maya region may have involved some form of military invasion; however, it is generally noted that significant Teotihuacan-Maya interactions date from at least the Early Classic period, well before the episodes of Late Classic collapse.[9]

The foreign invasion theory does not answer the question of where the inhabitants went. David Webster believed that the population should have increased because of the lack of elite power. Further, it is not understood why the governmental institutions were not remade following the revolts, which happened under similar circumstances in places like China. A study by anthropologist Elliot M. Abrams came to the conclusion that buildings, specifically in Copan, did not require an extensive amount of time and workers to construct.[10] However, this theory was developed during a period when the archaeological evidence showed that there were fewer Maya people than there are now known to have been.[11] Revolutions, peasant revolts, and social turmoil change circumstances, and are often followed by foreign wars, but they run their course. There are no documented revolutions that caused wholesale abandonment of entire regions.[citation needed]

It has been hypothesized that the decline of the Maya is related to the collapse of their intricate trade systems, especially those connected to the central Mexican city of Teotihuacn. Preceding improved knowledge of the chronology of Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan was believed to have fallen during 700750, forcing the “restructuring of economic relations throughout highland Mesoamerica and the Gulf Coast”.[12] This remaking of relationships between civilizations would have then given the collapse of the Classic Maya a slightly later date. However, after knowing more about the events and the periods when they occurred, it is believed that the strongest Teotihuacan influence was during the 4th and 5thcenturies. In addition, the civilization of Teotihuacan started to lose its power, and maybe abandoned the city, during 600650. This differs greatly from the previous belief that Teotihuacano power decreased during 700750.[13] But since the new decline date of 600650 has been accepted, the Maya civilizations are now thought to have lived on and prospered for another century and more[14] than what was previously believed. Rather than the decline of Teotihuacan directly preceding the collapse of the Maya, their decline is now seen as contributing to the 6th-century hiatus.[14]

The disease theory is also a contender as a factor in the Classic Maya collapse. Widespread disease could explain some rapid depopulation, both directly through the spread of infection itself and indirectly as an inhibition to recovery over the long run. According to Dunn (1968) and Shimkin (1973), infectious diseases spread by parasites are common in tropical rainforest regions, such as the Maya lowlands. Shimkin specifically suggests that the Maya may have encountered endemic infections related to American trypanosomiasis, Ascaris, and some enteropathogens that cause acute diarrheal illness. Furthermore, some experts believe that, through development of their civilization (that is, development of agriculture and settlements), the Maya could have created a “disturbed environment”, in which parasitic and pathogen-carrying insects often thrive.[15] Among the pathogens listed above, it is thought that those that cause the acute diarrheal illnesses would have been the most devastating to the Maya population, because such illness would have struck a victim at an early age, thereby hampering nutritional health and the natural growth and development of a child. This would have made them more susceptible to other diseases later in life, and would have been exacerbated by an increasing dependence on carbohydrate-rich crops.[16] Such ideas as this could explain the role of disease as at least a possible partial reason for the Classic Maya Collapse.[17]

Large droughts hit the Yucatn Peninsula and Petn Basin areas with particular ferocity, as thin tropical soils decline in fertility and become unworkable when deprived of forest cover,[18] and due to regular seasonal drought drying up surface water.[19] Colonial Spanish officials accurately documented cycles of drought, famine, disease, and war, providing a reliable historical record of the basic drought pattern in the Maya region.[20]

Climatic factors were first implicated in the collapse as early as 1931 by Mayanists Thomas Gann and J. E. S. Thompson.[21] In The Great Maya Droughts, Richardson Gill gathers and analyzes an array of climatic, historical, hydrologic, tree ring, volcanic, geologic, lake bed, and archeological research, and demonstrates that a prolonged series of droughts probably caused the Classic Maya collapse.[22] The drought theory provides a comprehensive explanation, because non-environmental and cultural factors (excessive warfare, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, less trade, etc.) can all be explained by the effects of prolonged drought on Classic Maya civilization.[23]

Climatic changes are, with increasing frequency, found to be major drivers in the rise and fall of civilizations all over the world.[24] Professors Harvey Weiss of Yale University and Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts have written, “Many lines of evidence now point to climate forcing as the primary agent in repeated social collapse.”[25] In a separate publication, Weiss illustrates an emerging understanding of scientists:

Within the past five years new tools and new data for archaeologists, climatologists, and historians have brought us to the edge of a new era in the study of global and hemispheric climate change and its cultural impacts. The climate of the Holocene, previously assumed static, now displays a surprising dynamism, which has affected the agricultural bases of pre-industrial societies. The list of Holocene climate alterations and their socio-economic effects has rapidly become too complex for brief summary.[26]

The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought brought about the Classic Maya collapse. According to the particular version put forward by Gill in The Great Maya Droughts,

[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores … provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD800 to 1000 … the most severe in the last 7,000years … precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse.[27]

Climatic modeling, tree ring data, and historical climate data show that cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere is associated with drought in Mesoamerica.[28] Northern Europe suffered extremely low[clarification needed] temperatures around the same time as the Maya droughts. The same connection between drought in the Maya areas and extreme cold in northern Europe was found again at the beginning of the 20thcentury. Volcanic activity, within and outside Mesoamerica, is also correlated with colder weather and resulting drought, as the effects of the Tambora volcano eruption in 1815 indicate.[29]

Mesoamerican civilization provides a remarkable exception: civilization prospering in the tropical swampland. The Maya are often perceived as having lived in a rainforest, but technically, they lived in a seasonal desert without access to stable sources of drinking water.[30] The exceptional accomplishments of the Maya are even more remarkable because of their engineered response to the fundamental environmental difficulty of relying upon rainwater rather than permanent sources of water. The Maya succeeded in creating a civilization in a seasonal desert by creating a system of water storage and management which was totally dependent on consistent rainfall.[31] The constant need for water kept the Maya on the edge of survival. Given this precarious balance of wet and dry conditions, even a slight shift in the distribution of annual precipitation can have serious consequences.[19] Water and civilization were vitally connected in ancient Mesoamerica. Archaeologist and specialist in pre-industrial land and water usage practices Vernon Scarborough believes water management and access were critical to the development of Maya civilization.[32]

Critics of the drought theory wonder why the southern and central lowland cities were abandoned and the northern cities like Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Coba continued to thrive.[33] One critic argued that Chichen Itza revamped its political, military, religious, and economic institutions away from powerful lords or kings.[34] Inhabitants of the northern Yucatn also had access to seafood, which might have explained the survival of Chichen Itza and Mayapan, cities away from the coast but within reach of coastal food supplies.[35] Critics of the drought theory also point to current weather patterns: much heavier rainfall in the southern lowlands compared to the lighter amount of rain in the northern Yucatn. Drought theory supporters state that the entire regional climate changed, including the amount of rainfall, so that modern rainfall patterns are not indicative of rainfall from 800 to 900. LSU archaeologist Heather McKillop found a significant[clarification needed] rise in sea level along the coast nearest the southern Maya lowlands, coinciding with the end of the Classic period, and indicating climate change.[36]

David Webster, a critic of the megadrought theory, says that much of the evidence provided by Gill comes from the northern Yucatn and not the southern part of the peninsula, where Classic Maya civilization flourished. He also states that if water sources were to have dried up, then several city-states would have moved to other water sources. That Gill suggests that all water in the region would have dried up and destroyed Maya civilization is a stretch, according to Webster,[37] although Webster does not have a precise competing theory explaining the Classic Maya Collapse.

A study published in Science in 2012 found that modest rainfall reductions, amounting to only 25 to 40 percent of annual rainfall, may have been the tipping point to the Maya collapse. Based on samples of lake and cave sediments in the areas surrounding major Maya cities, the researchers were able to determine the amount of annual rainfall in the region. The mild droughts that took place between 800950 would therefore be enough to rapidly deplete seasonal water supplies in the Yucatn lowlands, where there are no rivers.[38][39][40]

A study published in Scientific Reports in 2016 showed that between 750 and 900 a cluster of four earthquakes affected the wet tropical mountains south of the Yucatn lowlands, which are not vulnerable to drought, and include such important cities as Quirigua and Copn. These earthquakes left detectable destruction in several Maya cities and led to the abandonment of Quirigua. The study hypothesizes that repeated destruction combined with declining trade with the Maya kingdoms of the Yucatn lowlands to propagate the collapse to the southern part of the Maya realm.[41]

LIDAR scanning of the Classic Maya heartlands bolsters the drought theory. A huge population as we now understand existed would not ordinarily disappear from civil war, revolution, soil degradation, disease, earthquake or other suspected factors. Drought, the absence of water in an agricultural system heavily dependent upon water, is almost the only remaining possibility for the collapse in the entire heavily populated region. The Yucatn may have provided underground water and more rainfall to permit the continuance of Mayan civilization there.

Some ecological theories of Maya decline focus on the worsening agricultural and resource conditions in the late Classic period. It was originally thought that the majority of Maya agriculture was dependent on a simple slash-and-burn system. Based on this method, the hypothesis of soil exhaustion was advanced by Orator F. Cook in 1921. Similar soil exhaustion assumptions are associated with erosion, intensive agricultural, and savanna grass competition.

More recent investigations have shown a complicated variety of intensive agricultural techniques utilized by the Maya, explaining the high population of the Classic Maya polities. Modern archaeologists now comprehend the sophisticated intensive and productive agricultural techniques of the ancient Maya, and several of the Maya agricultural methods have not yet been reproduced. Intensive agricultural methods were developed and utilized by all the Mesoamerican cultures to boost their food production and give them a competitive advantage over less skillful peoples.[42] These intensive agricultural methods included canals, terracing, raised fields, ridged fields, chinampas, the use of human feces as fertilizer, seasonal swamps or bajos, using muck from the bajos to create fertile fields, dikes, dams, irrigation, water reservoirs, several types of water storage systems, hydraulic systems, swamp reclamation, swidden systems, and other agricultural techniques that have not yet been fully understood.[43] Systemic ecological collapse is said to be evidenced by deforestation, siltation, and the decline of biological diversity.

In addition to mountainous terrain, Mesoamericans successfully exploited the very problematic tropical rainforest for 1,500years.[44] The agricultural techniques utilized by the Maya were entirely dependent upon ample supplies of water, lending credit to the drought theory of collapse. The Maya thrived in territory that would be uninhabitable to most peoples. Their success over two millennia in this environment was “amazing.”[45]

Anthropologist Joseph Tainter wrote extensively about the collapse of the Southern Lowland Maya in his 1988 study The Collapse of Complex Societies. His theory about Maya collapse encompasses some of the above explanations, but focuses specifically on the development of and the declining marginal returns from the increasing social complexity of the competing Maya city-states.[46] Psychologist Julian Jaynes suggested that the collapse was due to a failure in the social control systems of religion and political authority, due to increasing socioeconomic complexity that overwhelmed the power of traditional rituals and the king’s authority to compel obedience.[47]

(To download the PDF edition of this article, click here. It was originally published on Roosh V.)

It was Joes first date with Mary. He asked her what she wanted in life and she replied, I want to establish my career. Thats the most important thing to me right now. Undeterred that she had no need for a man in her life, Joe entertained her with enough funny stories and cocky statements that she soon allowed him to lightly pet her forearm.

At the end of the date, he locked arms with her on the walk to the subway station, when two Middle Eastern men on scooter patrol accosted them and said they were forbidden to touch. This is Sharia zone, they said in heavily accented English, in front of a Halal butcher shop. Joe and Mary felt bad that they offended the two men, because they were trained in school to respect all religions but that of their ancestors. One of the first things they learned was that their white skin gave them extra privilege in life which must be consciously restrained at all times. Even if they happened to disagree with the two men, they could not verbally object because of anti-hate laws that would put them in jail for religious discrimination. They unlocked arms and maintained a distance of three feet from each other.

Unfortunately for Joe, Mary did not want to go out with him again, but seven years later he did receive a message from her on Facebook saying hello. She became vice president of a company, but could not find a man equal to her station since women now made 25% more than men on average. Joe had long left the country and moved to Thailand, where he married a young Thai girl and had three children. He had no plans on returning to his country, America.

If cultural collapse occurs in the way I will now describe, the above scenario will be the rule within a few decades. The Western world is being colonized in reverse, not by weapons or hard power, but through a combination of progressivism and low reproductive rates. These two factors will lead to a complete cultural collapse of many Western nations within the next 200 years. This theory will show the most likely mechanism that it will proceed in America, Canada, UK, Scandinavia, and Western Europe.

Cultural collapse is the decline, decay, or disappearance of a native populations rituals, habits, interpersonal communication, relationships, art, and language. It coincides with a relative decline of population compared to outside groups. National identity and group identification will be lost while revisionist history will be applied to demonize or find fault with the native population. Cultural collapse is not to be confused with economic or state collapse. A nation that suffers from a cultural collapse can still be economically productive and have a working government.

First I will share a brief summary of the cultural collapse progression before explaining them in more detail. Then I will discuss where I see many countries along its path.

1. Removal of religious narrative from peoples lives, replaced by a treadmill of scientific and technological progress.

Religion has been a powerful restraint for millennia in preventing humans from pursuing their base desires and narcissistic tendencies so that they satisfy a god. Family formation is the central unit of most religions, possibly because children increase membership at zero marginal cost to the church (i.e. they dont need to be recruited).

Religion may promote scientific ignorance, but it facilitates reproduction by giving people a narrative that places family near the center of their existence.[1] [2] [3] After the Enlightenment, the rapid advance of science and its logical but nihilistic explanations into the universe have removed the religious narrative and replaced it with an empty narrative of scientific progress, knowledge, and technology, which act as a restraint and hindrance to family formation, allowing people to pursue individual goals of wealth accumulation or hedonistic pleasure seeking.[4] As of now, there has not been a single non-religious population that has been able to reproduce above the death rate.[5]

Even though many people today claim to believe in god, they may not step inside a church but once or twice a year for special holidays. Religion went from being a lifestyle, a manual for living, to something that is thought about in passing.

Once religion no longer plays a role in peoples lives, the stage is set to fracture male-female bonding. It is collectively attacked by several ideologies stemming from the beliefs of Cultural Marxist theory, which serve to accomplish one common end: destruction of the family unit so that citizens are dependent on the state. They achieve this goal through the marginalization of men and their role in society under the banner of equality.[6] With feminism pushed to the forefront of this umbrella movement, the drive for equality ends up being a power grab by women.[7] This attack is performed on a range of fronts:

The end result is that men, confused about their identify and averse to state punishment from sexual harassment, date rape, and divorce proceedings, make a rational decision to wait on the sidelines.[15] Women, still not happy with the increased power given to them, continue their assault on men by instructing them to man up into what has become an unfair dealmarriage. The elevation of women above men is allowed by corporations, which adopt girl power marketing to expand their consumer base and increase profits.[16] [17] Governments also allow it because it increases their tax revenue. Because there is money to be made with women working and becoming consumers, there is no effort by the elite to halt this development.

At the same time men are emasculated as mere sperm donors, women are encouraged to adopt the career goals, mannerisms, and competitive lifestyles of men, inevitably causing them to delay marriage, often into an age where they can no longer find suitable husbands who have more resources than themselves. [18] [19] [20] [21] The average woman will find it exceedingly difficult to balance career and family, and since she has no concern of getting fired from her family, who she may see as a hindrance to her career goals, she will devote an increasing proportion of time into her job.

Female income, in aggregate, will soon match or exceed that of men.[22] [23] [24] A key reason that women historically got married was to be economically provided for, but this reason will no longer persist and women will feel less pressure or motivation to marry. The burgeoning spinster population will simply be a money-making opportunity for corporations to market to an increasing population of lonely women. Cat and small dog sales will rise.

Women succumb to their primal sexual and materialistic urges to live the Sex and the City lifestyle full of fine dining, casual sex, technological bliss, and general gluttony without learning traditional household skills or feminine qualities that would make them attractive wives.[25] [26] Men adapt to careerist women in a rational way by doing the following:

Careerist women who decide to marry will do so in a hurried rush around 30 because they fear growing old alone, but since they are well past their fertility peak[31], they may find it difficult to reproduce. In the event of successful reproduction at such a later age, fewer children can be born before biological infertility, limiting family size compared to the historical past.

The stage is now set for the death rate to outstrip the birth rate. This creates a demographic cliff where there is a growing population of non-working elderly relative to able-bodied younger workers. Two problems result:

No modern nation has figured out how to substantially raise birth rates among native populations. The most successful effort has been done in France, but that has still kept the birth rate among French-born women just under the replacement rate (2.08 vs 2.1).[34] The easiest and fastest way to solve this double-edged problem is to promote mass immigration of non-elderly individuals who will work, spend, and procreate at rates greater than natives.[35]

A replenishing supply of births are necessary to create taxpayers, workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers in order to maintain the nations economic development.[36] While many claim that the planet is suffering from overpopulation, an economic collapse is inevitable for those countries who do not increase their population at steady rates.

An aging population without youthful refilling will cause a scarcity of labor, increasing that labors price. Corporate elites will now lobby governments for immigration reform to relieve this upward pressure on wages.[37] [38] At the same time, the modern mantra of sustained GDP growth puts pressure on politicians for dissemination of favorable economic growth data to aid in their re-elections. The simplest way to increase GDP without innovation or development of industry is to expand the population. Both corporate and political elites now have their goals in alignment where the easiest solution becomes immigration.[39] [40]

While politicians hem and haw about designing permanent immigration policies, immigrants continue to settle within the nation.[41] The national birth rate problem is essentially solved overnight, as its much easier to drain third-world nations of its starry-eyed population with enticements of living in the first-world than it is to encourage the native women to reproduce. (Lateral immigration from one first-world nation to another is so relatively insignificant that the niche term expatriation has been developed to describe it). Native women will show a stubborn resistance at any suggestion they should create families, much preferring a relatively responsibility-free lifestyle of sexual variety, casual internet dating via mobile apps, consumer excess, and comfortable high-paying jobs in air conditioned offices.[42] [43]

Immigrants will almost always come from societies that are more religious and, in the case of Islam with regard to European immigration, far more scientifically primitive and rigid in its customs.[44]

While many adult immigrants will feel gracious at the opportunity to live in a more prosperous nation, others will soon feel resentment that they are forced to work menial jobs in a country that is far more expensive than their own.[45] [46] [47] [48] [49] The majority of them remain in lower economic classes, living in poor immigrant communities where they can speak their own language, find their own homeland foods, and follow their own customs or religion.

Instead of breaking out of their foreigner communities, immigrants seek to expand it by organizing. They form local groups and civic organizations to teach natives better ways to understand and serve immigrant populations. They will be eager to publicize cases where immigrants have been insulted by insensitive natives or treated unfairly by police authorities in the case of petty crime.[50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] School curriculums may be changed to promote diversity or multiculturalism, at great expense to the native culture.[56] Concessions will be made not to offend immigrants.[57] A continual stream of outrages will be found and this will feed the power of the organizations and create a state within a state where native elites become fearful of applying laws to immigrants.[58]

This step has not yet happened in any first-world nation, so I will predict it based on logically extending known events I have already described.

Local elites will give lip service to immigrant groups for votes but will be slow to give them real state or economic power. Citizenship rules may even be tightened to prevent immigrants from being elected. The elites will be mostly insulated from the cultural crises in their isolated communities, private schools, and social clubs, where they can continue to incubate their own sub-culture without outside influence. At the same time, they will make speeches and enact polices to force native citizens to accept multiculturalism and blind immigration. Anti-hate and anti-discrimination laws will be more vigorously enforced than other more serious crimes. Police will monitor social networking to identify those who make statements against protected classes.

Cultural decline begins in earnest when the natives feel shame or guilt for who they are, their history, their way of life, and where their ancestors came from. They will let immigrant groups criticize their customs without protest, or they simply embrace immigrant customs instead with religious conversion and interethnic marriages. Nationalistic pride will be condemned as a far-right phenomenon and popular nationalistic politicians will be compared to Hitler. Natives learn the art of self-censorship, limiting the range of their speech and expressions, and soon only the elderly can speak the truths of the cultural decline while a younger multiculturalist within earshot attributes such frankness to senility or racist nostalgia.

With the already entrenched environment of political correctness (see stage 2), the local culture becomes a sort of world culture that can be declared tolerant and progressive as long as there is a lack of criticism against immigrants, multiculturalism, and their combined influence. All cultural identity will eventually be lost, and to be American or British, for example, will no longer have modern meaning from a sociological perspective. Native traditions will be eradicated and a cultural mixing will take place where citizens from one world nation will be nearly identical in behavior, thought, and consumer tastes to citizens of another. Once a collapse occurs, it cannot be reversed. The nations cultural heritage will be forever lost.

I want to now take a brief look at six different countries and see where they are along the cultural collapse progression

This is an interesting case because, up to recently, we saw very low birth rates not due to progressive ideals but from a rough transition to capitalism in the 1990s and a high male mortality from alcoholism.[59] [60] To help sustain its population, Russia is readily accepting immigrants from Central Asian regions, treating them like second-class citizens and refusing to make any accommodations away from the ethnic Russian way of life. Even police authorities turn a blind eye when local skinhead groups attack immigrants.[61] In addition, Russia has also shown no tolerance to homosexual or progressive groups,[62] stunting their negative effects upon the culture. The birth rate has risen in recent years to levels seen in Western Europe but its still not above the death rate. Russia will see a population collapse before a cultural one.

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Very low

Were seeing rapid movement through stages 2 and 3, where progressive ideology based on the American model is becoming adopted and a large poor population ensure progressive politicians will continue to remain in power with promises of economic redistribution.[63] [64] [65] Within 15 years we should see a sharp drop in birth rates and a relaxation of immigration laws.

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Moderate

Some could argue that America is currently experiencing a cultural collapse. It always had a fragile culture because of its immigrant foundings, but immigrants of the past (including my own parents) rapidly acclimated into the host culture to create a sense of national pride around an ethic of hard work and shared democratic values. This is being eroded as a fem-centric culture rises in its place, with its focus on trends, celebrities, homosexuality, multiculturalism, and male-bashing. Natives have become pleasure seekers with little inclination to reproduction during their years of peak fertility.[66]

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Very high

While America always had high amounts of immigration, and therefore a system of integration, England is newer to the game. In the past 20 years, they have massively ramped up their immigration efforts.[67] A visit to London will confirm that the native British are slowly becoming minorities, with their iconic red telephone booths left undisturbed purely for tourist photo opportunities. Approximately 5% of the English population is now Muslim.[68] Instead of acclimatizing, they are achieving early success in creating zones with Sharia law.[69] The English elite, in response, is jailing natives under stringent anti-race laws.[70] England had a highly successful immigration story with Polish immigrants who eagerly acclimated to English culture, but have opened the doors to other peoples who dont want to integrate.[71]

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Very high

Sweden is experiencing a similar immigration situation to England, but they possess a higher amount of self-shame and white guilt. Instead of allowing immigrants who could work in the Swedish economy, they are encouraging migration of asylum seekers who have been made destitute by war. These immigrants enter Sweden and immediately receive social benefits. In effect, Sweden is welcoming the least economically productive people in the world.[72] The immigrants will produce little or no economic benefit, and may even worsen Swedens economy. Immigrants are turning some parts of Sweden, such as the Rosengard area of Malmo, into a ghetto.[73]

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Very high

From my one and half years of living in Poland, I have seen a moderate level of progressive ideological creep, careerism among women, hedonism, and idolation of Western values, particularly out of England, where a large percentage of the Polish population have emigrated for work. Younger Poles may not act much different from their Western counterparts in their party lifestyle behavior, but there nonetheless remains a tenuous maintenance of traditional sex roles. Women of fertile age are pursuing relationships over one-night stands, but careerism is causing them to stall family formation. This puts a downward pressure on birth rates, which stems from significant numbers of fertile young women emigrating to countries like the UK and USA, along with continued economic uncertainties faced from transitioning to capitalism[74]. As Europes least multicultural nation, Poland has long been hesitant to accept immigrants, but this has recently changed and they are encouraging migrants.[75] To its credit, it is seeking first-world entrepreneurs instead of low skilled laborers or asylum seekers. Its cultural fate will be an interesting development in the years to come, but the prognosis will be more negative as long as its young people are eager to leave the homeland.

Likelihood of 50-year cultural collapse: Possible

Poland and Russia show the limitations of Cultural Collapse Theory in that it best applies to first-world nations with highly developed economies. They have low birth rates but not through the mechanism I described, though if they adopt a more Western ideological track like Brazil, I expect to see the same outcome that is befalling England or Sweden.

There can be many paths to cultural destruction, and those nations with the most similarities will gravitate towards the same path, just like how Eastern European nations are suffering low birth rates because of mass emigration due to being introduced into the European Union.

Maintaining native birth rates while preventing the elite from allowing immigrant labor is the most effective means at preventing cultural collapse. Since multiculturalism is an experiment with no proven efficacy, a culture can only be maintained by a relatively homogenous group who identify with each other. When that homogeneity breaks down and one citizen looks to the next and does not see a person with the same values as himself, the culture falls in dis-repair as native citizens begin to lose a shared means of communication and identity. Once the percentage of the immigrant population crosses a certain threshold (perhaps 15%), the decline will pick up in pace and cultural breakdown will be readily apparent to all observers.

Current policies to solve low birth rates through immigration is a short-term fix with dire long-term consequences. In effect, its a Trojan-horse prescription of irreversible cultural destruction. A state must prevent itself from entering the position where mass immigration is considered a solution by blocking progressive ideologies from taking hold. One way this can be done is through the promotion of a state-sponsored religion which encourages the nuclear family instead of single motherhood and homosexuality. However, introducing religion as a mainstay of citizen life in the post-enlightenment era may be impossible.

We must consider that the scientific era is an evolutionary maladaptive feature of humanity that natural selection will accordingly punish (i.e. those who are anti-religious and pro-science will simply breed less). It must also be considered that with religion in permanent decline, cultural collapse may be a certainty that eventually occurs in all developed nations. Religion, it may turn out, was evolutionary beneficial to the human race.

Another possible solution is to foster a patriarchal society where men serve as strong providers. If you encourage the development of successful men who possess indispensable skills and therefore resources that are lacked by females, there will be women below their station who want to marry and procreate with them, but if strong women are produced instead, marriage and procreation is unlikely to take place at levels above the death rate.

A gap between the sexes should always exist in the favor of men if procreation is to occur at high rates, or else youll have something similar to the situation in America where urban professional women cannot find good men to begin a family with (i.e., men who are significantly more financially successful than them). They instead remain single and barren, only used occasionally by cads for exciting casual sex.

One issue that I purposefully ignored is the effect of technology and consumerism on lowering birth rates. How much influence does video games, internet, and smartphones contribute to a birth decline? How much of an effect does Western-style consumerism have in delaying marriage? I suspect they have more of an amplification effect than being an outright cause. If a country is proceeding through the cultural collapse model, technology will simply hurry the collapse, but giving internet access to a traditionally religious group of people may not cause them to flip overnight. Research will have to be done in these areas to say for sure.

The first iteration of any theory is sure to create as many questions as answers, but I hope that by proposing this model, it becomes more clear why some cultures seem so quick to degrade while others display a sort of immunity. Some countries may be too far down the wrong path to be saved, but I hope the information presented gives concerned readers ideas on protecting their own culture by allowing them to connect how progressive ideologies that may seem innocent or benign on the surface can eventually lead to an outright collapse of their nations culture.

If you like this article and are concerned about the future of the Western world, check out Roosh’s book Free Speech Isn’t Free. It gives an inside look to how the globalist establishment is attempting to marginalize masculine men with a leftist agenda that promotes censorship, feminism, and sterility. It also shares key knowledge and tools that you can use to defend yourself against social justice attacks. Click here to learn more about the book. Your support will help maintain our operation.

R35 Billion Wasted . Were has it gone ??? Creating jobs for who and what ??? If this was for job creation , more people would have jobs . With this type of wastage , We do not need E-tolls . Look at the Pot- Holes that is not fixed . Scrap the system as it is Corrupts same as Goverment . Sorry this is Government we talking about .

In 1967, with the Civil Rights movement still in full swing and Jim Crow still looming in the rearview mirror, median household income was 43% higher for white, non-Hispanic households than for black households. But things changed dramatically over the next half century, as legal segregation faded into history. By 2011, median white household income was 72% higher than median black household income, according to a Census report from that year [PDF].

To say that economic inequality is still a heavily racialized phenomenon, even a generation after the end of the Civil Rights era, would be an understatement. Yet both major parties continue to discuss inequality in largely color-blind terms, only hinting at the role played by race.

The trend is even more startling when one looks at median household wealth instead of yearly income. In 1984, the white-to-black wealth ratio was 12-to-1, according to Pew Research Center. By 1995, the chasm had narrowed until median white income had only a 5-to-1 advantage over black income. But over the next 14 years the wealth gap began to grow once again, until it had skyrocketed up to 19-to-1 in 2009.

Yet even a recent 204-page analysis of the federal War on Poverty, spearheaded by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., gives only passing mentions to racial disparity. In the first section of the report, which purports to explain the causes of modern poverty, Ryan and his co-authors bring up race only twice: Once to identify the breakdown of the familiy as a key cause of poverty within the black community, citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and again to applaud the narrowing of the achievement gap between white and black schoolchildren. Weeks later, during a radio appearance, Ryan said poverty is in part to blame on the fact that inner cities have a culture of men not working.

President Obama went a step forward in Decembers major address on inequality, when he noted that the painful legacy of discrimination means that African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans are far more likely to suffer from a lack of opportunityhigher unemployment, higher poverty rates. Yet that amounted to a footnote in a speech that also included the line, The opportunity gap in America is now as much about class as it is about race.

I think it doesnt make for good politics, said Color of Change executive director Rashad Robinson of the racial wealth gap. Its messy and requires us to be deep and think about much bigger and more long-term solutions than Washingtons oftentimes willing to deal with.

Yet in a serious discussion about American inequality, the subject of race is essentially unavoidable. Thats because most of the pipelines to a higher economic classsuch as employment and homeownershipare oftentimes not equally accessible to black folks, said Robinson.

Disparities in homeownership are a major driver of the racial wealth gap, according to a recent study from Brandeis University. According to the authors of the report, redlining [a form of discrimination in banking or insurance practices], discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, lack of access to credit, and lower incomes have blocked the homeownership path for African-Americans while creating and reinforcing communities segregated by race.

Many of the black families that have successfully battled their way to homeownership over the past few decades saw their nest eggs get pulverized by the 2008 financial collapse. The Brandeis researchers found that half the collective wealth of African-American families was stripped away during the Great Recession, in large part due to the collapse of the housing market and the subsequent explosion in the nationwide foreclosure rate.

Similarly, employment discrimination has done its part to ensure that black unemployment remains twice as high as white unemploymenta ratio that has stayed largely consistent since the mid-1950s. National Bureau of Economy Research fellows have found that resumes are significantly less likely to get a positive response from potential employers if the applicants have names that are more common in the black community. And an arrest for even a non-violent drug offense can haunt a job applicant for the rest of his life; combined with the fact that black people are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, despite using the drug at roughly the same rate, criminal background checks have helped to fuel racial inequity in job hiring.

Yet both parties have stressed personal responsibility to an outsized degree, said William Darity Jr., the director of Duke Universitys Consortium on Social Equity.

The underlying narrative that many people share is that whatever inequities still exist, theyre due to the misbehavior or disfunctional behavior of black folks themselves, said Darity. So theres no reason to pay attention to racial disparities because one doesnt believe theyre still significant, or theres no need for public policy action by the government because its just a question of black folks changing their own behaviors.

Darity portrayed this as a bipartisan problem and criticized President Obama for [playing] into that behavior by emphasizing personal responsibility in the My Brothers Keeper initiative to help young men of color. The conservative notion of a culture of povertyis another example of the fallacy, he said.

I think a lot of people are really attracted to stories about personal uplift or social mobility, but these are very exceptional cases, he said. Thats not the norm. Most people who are born into deprived circumstances do not really have the capacity or support to come out of those deprived circumstances.

Instead, he argued that the only way to break self-perpetuating inequality was through wealth transfers.

Peoples behaviors are largely shaped by the resources they possess, and if their resources alterned, than they might change their behaviors, he said.

People considering stem cell treatment for arthritis want to know Is it safe? and Is it effective?

Most stem cell therapy using adult stem cells is considered safe because the stem cells are collected from the patient, minimizing the risk of an unwanted reaction. The most common side effects are temporary swelling and pain.3

While most stem cell therapy for arthritis is considered safe, it does carry the same risks as any other medical procedure, such as a small risk of infection. Risk may be increased if:

See What Are Stem Cells?

Some research suggests stem cell therapy engaging in these kinds of practices may elevate the risk of tumors.4

As with most regenerative medicine treatments, research is ongoing, and FDA regulations are relatively new and subject to change.

Article continues below

Whether or not stem cells therapy is effective in treating osteoarthritis is a controversial subject among medical professionals, and research in the area is ongoing.

Critics emphasize that there have been no large-scale, prospective, double-blind research studiesthe kind of clinical studies that medical professionals consider the gold standardto support stem cell therapy for arthritis.

Factors that affect stem cell therapy researchAnother challenge associated with current stem cell research is that there is no standard stem cell therapy for arthritis treatment. So the stem cell therapy in one study is not necessarily the same as the stem cell therapy in another study.

Differences can include:

These differences are further complicated by more unknowns. For example, how many stem cells are needed for a particular treatment? And how do we determine if a patients own stem cells are competent enough to aid in healing?

Many physicians combine the use of stem cells with platelet rich plasma, or PRP.

See Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) Therapy for Arthritis

PRP is derived from a sample of the patients blood. In the body, platelets secrete substances called growth factors and other proteins that regulate cell division, stimulate tissue regeneration, and promote healing. Like stem cell therapy, PRP therapy is sometimes used alone with the hopes of healing an arthritic joint.

See PRP Injection Preparation and Composition

Physicians who use PRP and stem cells together think that the PRP can help maximize the healing effects of stem cells.7,8 Research in this area is ongoing.

See Platelet-Rich Plasma Injection Procedure

Stem cell therapy can vary depending on the doctor performing it. People considering stem cell therapy for an arthritic knee or other joint are advised to ask their doctors questions, including:

Both doctors and patients can benefit from having a frank conversation and setting reasonable expectations.

Eugenics (; from Greek eugenes ‘well-born’ from eu, ‘good, well’ and genos, ‘race, stock, kin’)[2][3] is a set of beliefs and practices that aims at improving the genetic quality of a human population.[4][5] The exact definition of eugenics has been a matter of debate since the term was coined by Francis Galton in 1883. The concept predates this coinage, with Plato suggesting applying the principles of selective breeding to humans around 400BCE.

Frederick Osborn’s 1937 journal article “Development of a Eugenic Philosophy”[6] framed it as a social philosophythat is, a philosophy with implications for social order. That definition is not universally accepted. Osborn advocated for higher rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits (positive eugenics), or reduced rates of sexual reproduction and sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics).

Alternatively, gene selection rather than “people selection” has recently been made possible through advances in genome editing,[7] leading to what is sometimes called new eugenics, also known as neo-eugenics, consumer eugenics, or liberal eugenics.

While eugenic principles have been practiced as far back in world history as ancient Greece, the modern history of eugenics began in the early 20th century when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom[8] and spread to many countries including the United States, Canada[9] and most European countries. In this period, eugenic ideas were espoused across the political spectrum. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies with the intent to improve the quality of their populations’ genetic stock. Such programs included both “positive” measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly “fit” to reproduce, and “negative” measures such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction. People deemed unfit to reproduce often included people with mental or physical disabilities, people who scored in the low ranges of different IQ tests, criminals and deviants, and members of disfavored minority groups. The eugenics movement became negatively associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust when many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials attempted to justify their human rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and the U.S. eugenics programs.[10] In the decades following World War II, with the institution of human rights, many countries gradually began to abandon eugenics policies, although some Western countries, among them the United States and Sweden, continued to carry out forced sterilizations.

Since the 1980s and 1990s, when new assisted reproductive technology procedures became available such as gestational surrogacy (available since 1985), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (available since 1989), and cytoplasmic transfer (first performed in 1996), fear has emerged about a possible revival of eugenics.

A major criticism of eugenics policies is that, regardless of whether “negative” or “positive” policies are used, they are susceptible to abuse because the criteria of selection are determined by whichever group is in political power at the time. Furthermore, negative eugenics in particular is considered by many to be a violation of basic human rights, which include the right to reproduction. Another criticism is that eugenic policies eventually lead to a loss of genetic diversity, resulting in inbreeding depression due to lower genetic variation.

Seneca the Younger

The concept of positive eugenics to produce better human beings has existed at least since Plato suggested selective mating to produce a guardian class.[12] In Sparta, every Spartan child was inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia, which determined if the child was fit to live or not. In the early years of ancient Rome, a Roman father was obliged by law to immediately kill his child if they were physically disabled.[13] Among the ancient Germanic tribes, people who were cowardly, unwarlike or “stained with abominable vices” were put to death, usually by being drowned in swamps.[14][15]

The first formal negative eugenics, that is a legal provision against the birth of allegedly inferior human beings, was promulgated in Western European culture by the Christian Council of Agde in 506, which forbade marriage between cousins.[16]

This idea was also promoted by William Goodell (18291894) who advocated the castration and spaying of the insane.[17][18]

The idea of a modern project of improving the human population through a statistical understanding of heredity used to encourage good breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton and, initially, was closely linked to Darwinism and his theory of natural selection.[20] Galton had read his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which sought to explain the development of plant and animal species, and desired to apply it to humans. Based on his biographical studies, Galton believed that desirable human qualities were hereditary traits, although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory.[21] In 1883, one year after Darwin’s death, Galton gave his research a name: eugenics.[22] With the introduction of genetics, eugenics became associated with genetic determinism, the belief that human character is entirely or in the majority caused by genes, unaffected by education or living conditions. Many of the early geneticists were not Darwinians, and evolution theory was not needed for eugenics policies based on genetic determinism.[20] Throughout its recent history, eugenics has remained controversial.

Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from many sources.[24] Organizations were formed to win public support and sway opinion towards responsible eugenic values in parenthood, including the British Eugenics Education Society of 1907 and the American Eugenics Society of 1921. Both sought support from leading clergymen and modified their message to meet religious ideals.[25] In 1909 the Anglican clergymen William Inge and James Peile both wrote for the British Eugenics Education Society. Inge was an invited speaker at the 1921 International Eugenics Conference, which was also endorsed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Patrick Joseph Hayes.[25]

Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York City. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States.[26] It also took root in France, Germany, and Great Britain.[27] Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in other countries including Belgium,[28] Brazil,[29] Canada,[30] Japan and Sweden.

In addition to being practiced in a number of countries, eugenics was internationally organized through the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the Cold Spring Harbour Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution, and the Eugenics Record Office. Politically, the movement advocated measures such as sterilization laws. In its moral dimension, eugenics rejected the doctrine that all human beings are born equal and redefined moral worth purely in terms of genetic fitness. Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure “Nordic race” or “Aryan” genetic pool and the eventual elimination of “unfit” races.

Early critics of the philosophy of eugenics included the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward,[39] the English writer G. K. Chesterton, the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, who argued that advocates of eugenics greatly over-estimate the influence of biology,[40] and Scottish tuberculosis pioneer and author Halliday Sutherland. Ward’s 1913 article “Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics”, Chesterton’s 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils, and Boas’ 1916 article “Eugenics” (published in The Scientific Monthly) were all harshly critical of the rapidly growing movement. Sutherland identified eugenists as a major obstacle to the eradication and cure of tuberculosis in his 1917 address “Consumption: Its Cause and Cure”,[41] and criticism of eugenists and Neo-Malthusians in his 1921 book Birth Control led to a writ for libel from the eugenist Marie Stopes. Several biologists were also antagonistic to the eugenics movement, including Lancelot Hogben.[42] Other biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher expressed skepticism in the belief that sterilization of “defectives” would lead to the disappearance of undesirable genetic traits.[43]

Among institutions, the Catholic Church was an opponent of state-enforced sterilizations.[44] Attempts by the Eugenics Education Society to persuade the British government to legalize voluntary sterilization were opposed by Catholics and by the Labour Party.[45] The American Eugenics Society initially gained some Catholic supporters, but Catholic support declined following the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii.[25] In this, Pope Pius XI explicitly condemned sterilization laws: “Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason.”[46]

As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century, when it was practiced around the world and promoted by governments, institutions, and influential individuals. Many countries enacted[47] various eugenics policies, including: genetic screenings, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and sequestering the mentally ill), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, ultimately culminating in genocide.

The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler had praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf in 1925 and emulated eugenic legislation for the sterilization of “defectives” that had been pioneered in the United States once he took power. Some common early 20th century eugenics methods involved identifying and classifying individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, homosexuals, and racial groups (such as the Roma and Jews in Nazi Germany) as “degenerate” or “unfit”, and therefore led to segregation, institutionalization, sterilization, euthanasia, and even mass murder. The Nazi practice of euthanasia was carried out on hospital patients in the Aktion T4 centers such as Hartheim Castle.

By the end of World War II, many discriminatory eugenics laws were abandoned, having become associated with Nazi Germany.[50] H. G. Wells, who had called for “the sterilization of failures” in 1904,[51] stated in his 1940 book The Rights of Man: Or What are we fighting for? that among the human rights, which he believed should be available to all people, was “a prohibition on mutilation, sterilization, torture, and any bodily punishment”.[52] After World War II, the practice of “imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group” fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[53] The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims “the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons”.[54] In spite of the decline in discriminatory eugenics laws, some government mandated sterilizations continued into the 21st century. During the ten years President Alberto Fujimori led Peru from 1990 to 2000, 2,000 persons were allegedly involuntarily sterilized.[55] China maintained its one-child policy until 2015 as well as a suite of other eugenics based legislation to reduce population size and manage fertility rates of different populations.[56][57][58] In 2007 the United Nations reported coercive sterilizations and hysterectomies in Uzbekistan.[59] During the years 2005 to 2013, nearly one-third of the 144 California prison inmates who were sterilized did not give lawful consent to the operation.[60]

Developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century have raised numerous questions regarding the ethical status of eugenics, effectively creating a resurgence of interest in the subject.Some, such as UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, claim that modern genetics is a back door to eugenics.[61] This view is shared by White House Assistant Director for Forensic Sciences, Tania Simoncelli, who stated in a 2003 publication by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College that advances in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are moving society to a “new era of eugenics”, and that, unlike the Nazi eugenics, modern eugenics is consumer driven and market based, “where children are increasingly regarded as made-to-order consumer products”.[62] In a 2006 newspaper article, Richard Dawkins said that discussion regarding eugenics was inhibited by the shadow of Nazi misuse, to the extent that some scientists would not admit that breeding humans for certain abilities is at all possible. He believes that it is not physically different from breeding domestic animals for traits such as speed or herding skill. Dawkins felt that enough time had elapsed to at least ask just what the ethical differences were between breeding for ability versus training athletes or forcing children to take music lessons, though he could think of persuasive reasons to draw the distinction.[63]

Lee Kuan Yew, the Founding Father of Singapore, started promoting eugenics as early as 1983.[64][65]

In October 2015, the United Nations’ International Bioethics Committee wrote that the ethical problems of human genetic engineering should not be confused with the ethical problems of the 20th century eugenics movements. However, it is still problematic because it challenges the idea of human equality and opens up new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who do not want, or cannot afford, the technology.[66]

Transhumanism is often associated with eugenics, although most transhumanists holding similar views nonetheless distance themselves from the term “eugenics” (preferring “germinal choice” or “reprogenetics”)[67] to avoid having their position confused with the discredited theories and practices of early-20th-century eugenic movements.

Prenatal screening can be considered a form of contemporary eugenics because it may lead to abortions of children with undesirable traits.[68]

The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Francis Galton in 1883,[69] drawing on the recent work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin.[70][71] Galton published his observations and conclusions in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

The origins of the concept began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance and the theories of August Weismann. The word eugenics is derived from the Greek word eu (“good” or “well”) and the suffix -gens (“born”), and was coined by Galton in 1883 to replace the word “stirpiculture”, which he had used previously but which had come to be mocked due to its perceived sexual overtones.[73] Galton defined eugenics as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations”.[74]

Historically, the term eugenics has referred to everything from prenatal care for mothers to forced sterilization and euthanasia.[75] To population geneticists, the term has included the avoidance of inbreeding without altering allele frequencies; for example, J. B. S. Haldane wrote that “the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities, was a powerful eugenic agent.”[76] Debate as to what exactly counts as eugenics continues today.[77]

Edwin Black, journalist and author of War Against the Weak, claims eugenics is often deemed a pseudoscience because what is defined as a genetic improvement of a desired trait is often deemed a cultural choice rather than a matter that can be determined through objective scientific inquiry.[78] The most disputed aspect of eugenics has been the definition of “improvement” of the human gene pool, such as what is a beneficial characteristic and what is a defect. Historically, this aspect of eugenics was tainted with scientific racism and pseudoscience.[79][80][81]

Early eugenists were mostly concerned with factors of perceived intelligence that often correlated strongly with social class. Some of these early eugenists include Karl Pearson and Walter Weldon, who worked on this at the University College London.[21]

Eugenics also had a place in medicine. In his lecture “Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics”, Karl Pearson said that everything concerning eugenics fell into the field of medicine. He basically placed the two words as equivalents. He was supported in part by the fact that Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, also had medical training.[82]

Eugenic policies have been conceptually divided into two categories.[75] Positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged; for example, the reproduction of the intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning.[83] The movie Gattaca provides a fictional example of a dystopian society that uses eugenics to decided what people are capable of and their place in the world. Negative eugenics aimed to eliminate, through sterilization or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally “undesirable”. This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning.[83] Both positive and negative eugenics can be coercive; abortion for fit women, for example, was illegal in Nazi Germany.[84]

Jon Entine claims that eugenics simply means “good genes” and using it as synonym for genocide is an “all-too-common distortion of the social history of genetics policy in the United States”. According to Entine, eugenics developed out of the Progressive Era and not “Hitler’s twisted Final Solution”.[85]

According to Richard Lynn, eugenics may be divided into two main categories based on the ways in which the methods of eugenics can be applied.[86]

The first major challenge to conventional eugenics based upon genetic inheritance was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan. He demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the hatching of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with white eyes from a family with red eyes. Morgan claimed that this demonstrated that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance and that the concept of eugenics based upon genetic inheritance was not completely scientifically accurate. Additionally, Morgan criticized the view that subjective traits, such as intelligence and criminality, were caused by heredity because he believed that the definitions of these traits varied and that accurate work in genetics could only be done when the traits being studied were accurately defined.[123] Despite Morgan’s public rejection of eugenics, much of his genetic research was absorbed by eugenics.[124][125]

The heterozygote test is used for the early detection of recessive hereditary diseases, allowing for couples to determine if they are at risk of passing genetic defects to a future child.[126] The goal of the test is to estimate the likelihood of passing the hereditary disease to future descendants.[126]

Recessive traits can be severely reduced, but never eliminated unless the complete genetic makeup of all members of the pool was known, as aforementioned. As only very few undesirable traits, such as Huntington’s disease, are dominant, it could be argued[by whom?] from certain perspectives that the practicality of “eliminating” traits is quite low.[citation needed]

There are examples of eugenic acts that managed to lower the prevalence of recessive diseases, although not influencing the prevalence of heterozygote carriers of those diseases. The elevated prevalence of certain genetically transmitted diseases among the Ashkenazi Jewish population (TaySachs, cystic fibrosis, Canavan’s disease, and Gaucher’s disease), has been decreased in current populations by the application of genetic screening.[127]

Pleiotropy occurs when one gene influences multiple, seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits, an example being phenylketonuria, which is a human disease that affects multiple systems but is caused by one gene defect.[128] Andrzej Pkalski, from the University of Wrocaw, argues that eugenics can cause harmful loss of genetic diversity if a eugenics program selects a pleiotropic gene that could possibly be associated with a positive trait. Pekalski uses the example of a coercive government eugenics program that prohibits people with myopia from breeding but has the unintended consequence of also selecting against high intelligence since the two go together.[129]

Eugenic policies could also lead to loss of genetic diversity, in which case a culturally accepted “improvement” of the gene pool could very likelyas evidenced in numerous instances in isolated island populations result in extinction due to increased vulnerability to disease, reduced ability to adapt to environmental change, and other factors both known and unknown. A long-term, species-wide eugenics plan might lead to a scenario similar to this because the elimination of traits deemed undesirable would reduce genetic diversity by definition.[130]

Edward M. Miller claims that, in any one generation, any realistic program should make only minor changes in a fraction of the gene pool, giving plenty of time to reverse direction if unintended consequences emerge, reducing the likelihood of the elimination of desirable genes.[131] Miller also argues that any appreciable reduction in diversity is so far in the future that little concern is needed for now.[131]

While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology, at this point no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Some diseases such as sickle-cell disease and cystic fibrosis respectively confer immunity to malaria and resistance to cholera when a single copy of the recessive allele is contained within the genotype of the individual. Reducing the instance of sickle-cell disease genes in Africa where malaria is a common and deadly disease could indeed have extremely negative net consequences.

However, some genetic diseases cause people to consider some elements of eugenics.

Societal and political consequences of eugenics call for a place in the discussion on the ethics behind the eugenics movement.[132] Many of the ethical concerns regarding eugenics arise from its controversial past, prompting a discussion on what place, if any, it should have in the future. Advances in science have changed eugenics. In the past, eugenics had more to do with sterilization and enforced reproduction laws.[133] Now, in the age of a progressively mapped genome, embryos can be tested for susceptibility to disease, gender, and genetic defects, and alternative methods of reproduction such as in vitro fertilization are becoming more common.[134] Therefore, eugenics is no longer ex post facto regulation of the living but instead preemptive action on the unborn.[135]

With this change, however, there are ethical concerns which lack adequate attention, and which must be addressed before eugenic policies can be properly implemented in the future. Sterilized individuals, for example, could volunteer for the procedure, albeit under incentive or duress, or at least voice their opinion. The unborn fetus on which these new eugenic procedures are performed cannot speak out, as the fetus lacks the voice to consent or to express his or her opinion.[136] Philosophers disagree about the proper framework for reasoning about such actions, which change the very identity and existence of future persons.[137]

A common criticism of eugenics is that “it inevitably leads to measures that are unethical”.[138] Some fear future “eugenics wars” as the worst-case scenario: the return of coercive state-sponsored genetic discrimination and human rights violations such as compulsory sterilization of persons with genetic defects, the killing of the institutionalized and, specifically, segregation and genocide of races perceived as inferior.[139] Health law professor George Annas and technology law professor Lori Andrews are prominent advocates of the position that the use of these technologies could lead to such human-posthuman caste warfare.[140][141]

In his 2003 book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, environmental ethicist Bill McKibben argued at length against germinal choice technology and other advanced biotechnological strategies for human enhancement. He writes that it would be morally wrong for humans to tamper with fundamental aspects of themselves (or their children) in an attempt to overcome universal human limitations, such as vulnerability to aging, maximum life span and biological constraints on physical and cognitive ability. Attempts to “improve” themselves through such manipulation would remove limitations that provide a necessary context for the experience of meaningful human choice. He claims that human lives would no longer seem meaningful in a world where such limitations could be overcome with technology. Even the goal of using germinal choice technology for clearly therapeutic purposes should be relinquished, since it would inevitably produce temptations to tamper with such things as cognitive capacities. He argues that it is possible for societies to benefit from renouncing particular technologies, using as examples Ming China, Tokugawa Japan and the contemporary Amish.[142]

Some, for example Nathaniel C. Comfort from Johns Hopkins University, claim that the change from state-led reproductive-genetic decision-making to individual choice has moderated the worst abuses of eugenics by transferring the decision-making from the state to the patient and their family.[143] Comfort suggests that “the eugenic impulse drives us to eliminate disease, live longer and healthier, with greater intelligence, and a better adjustment to the conditions of society; and the health benefits, the intellectual thrill and the profits of genetic bio-medicine are too great for us to do otherwise.”[144] Others, such as bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson of Keele University and Honorary Research Fellow Eve Garrard at the University of Manchester, claim that some aspects of modern genetics can be classified as eugenics, but that this classification does not inherently make modern genetics immoral. In a co-authored publication by Keele University, they stated that “[e]ugenics doesn’t seem always to be immoral, and so the fact that PGD, and other forms of selective reproduction, might sometimes technically be eugenic, isn’t sufficient to show that they’re wrong.”[145]

In their book published in 2000, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler argued that liberal societies have an obligation to encourage as wide an adoption of eugenic enhancement technologies as possible (so long as such policies do not infringe on individuals’ reproductive rights or exert undue pressures on prospective parents to use these technologies) in order to maximize public health and minimize the inequalities that may result from both natural genetic endowments and unequal access to genetic enhancements.[146]

Original position, a hypothetical situation developed by American philosopher John Rawls, has been used as an argument for negative eugenics.[147][148]

Eugenics, the selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations, typically in reference to humans. The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Charles Darwins theory of natural selection, advocated a system that would allow the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable. Social Darwinism, the popular theory in the late 19th century that life for humans in society was ruled by survival of the fittest, helped advance eugenics into serious scientific study in the early 1900s. By World War I many scientific authorities and political leaders supported eugenics. However, it ultimately failed as a science in the 1930s and 40s, when the assumptions of eugenicists became heavily criticized and the Nazis used eugenics to support the extermination of entire races.

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biological determinism: The eugenics movement

One of the most prominent movements to apply genetics to understanding social and personality traits was the eugenics movement, which originated in the late 19th century. Eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and naturalist Francis Galton, who was influenced by the

Although eugenics as understood today dates from the late 19th century, efforts to select matings in order to secure offspring with desirable traits date from ancient times. Platos Republic (c. 378 bce) depicts a society where efforts are undertaken to improve human beings through selective breeding. Later, Italian philosopher and poet Tommaso Campanella, in City of the Sun (1623), described a utopian community in which only the socially elite are allowed to procreate. Galton, in Hereditary Genius (1869), proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. In 1865 the basic laws of heredity were discovered by the father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel. His experiments with peas demonstrated that each physical trait was the result of a combination of two units (now known as genes) and could be passed from one generation to another. However, his work was largely ignored until its rediscovery in 1900. This fundamental knowledge of heredity provided eugenicistsincluding Galton, who influenced his cousin Charles Darwinwith scientific evidence to support the improvement of humans through selective breeding.

The advancement of eugenics was concurrent with an increasing appreciation of Darwins account for change or evolution within societywhat contemporaries referred to as social Darwinism. Darwin had concluded his explanations of evolution by arguing that the greatest step humans could make in their own history would occur when they realized that they were not completely guided by instinct. Rather, humans, through selective reproduction, had the ability to control their own future evolution. A language pertaining to reproduction and eugenics developed, leading to terms such as positive eugenics, defined as promoting the proliferation of good stock, and negative eugenics, defined as prohibiting marriage and breeding between defective stock. For eugenicists, nature was far more contributory than nurture in shaping humanity.

During the early 1900s eugenics became a serious scientific study pursued by both biologists and social scientists. They sought to determine the extent to which human characteristics of social importance were inherited. Among their greatest concerns were the predictability of intelligence and certain deviant behaviours. Eugenics, however, was not confined to scientific laboratories and academic institutions. It began to pervade cultural thought around the globe, including the Scandinavian countries, most other European countries, North America, Latin America, Japan, China, and Russia. In the United States the eugenics movement began during the Progressive Era and remained active through 1940. It gained considerable support from leading scientific authorities such as zoologist Charles B. Davenport, plant geneticist Edward M. East, and geneticist and Nobel Prize laureate Hermann J. Muller. Political leaders in favour of eugenics included U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of State Elihu Root, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall Harlan. Internationally, there were many individuals whose work supported eugenic aims, including British scientists J.B.S. Haldane and Julian Huxley and Russian scientists Nikolay K. Koltsov and Yury A. Filipchenko.

Galton had endowed a research fellowship in eugenics in 1904 and, in his will, provided funds for a chair of eugenics at University College, London. The fellowship and later the chair were occupied by Karl Pearson, a brilliant mathematician who helped to create the science of biometry, the statistical aspects of biology. Pearson was a controversial figure who believed that environment had little to do with the development of mental or emotional qualities. He felt that the high birth rate of the poor was a threat to civilization and that the higher races must supplant the lower. His views gave countenance to those who believed in racial and class superiority. Thus, Pearson shares the blame for the discredit later brought on eugenics.

In the United States, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was opened at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York, in 1910 with financial support from the legacy of railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman. Whereas ERO efforts were officially overseen by Charles B. Davenport, director of the Station for Experimental Study of Evolution (one of the biology research stations at Cold Spring Harbor), ERO activities were directly superintended by Harry H. Laughlin, a professor from Kirksville, Missouri. The ERO was organized around a series of missions. These missions included serving as the national repository and clearinghouse for eugenics information, compiling an index of traits in American families, training fieldworkers to gather data throughout the United States, supporting investigations into the inheritance patterns of particular human traits and diseases, advising on the eugenic fitness of proposed marriages, and communicating all eugenic findings through a series of publications. To accomplish these goals, further funding was secured from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Battle Creek Race Betterment Foundation, and the Human Betterment Foundation.

Prior to the founding of the ERO, eugenics work in the United States was overseen by a standing committee of the American Breeders Association (eugenics section established in 1906), chaired by ichthyologist and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan. Research from around the globe was featured at three international congresses, held in 1912, 1921, and 1932. In addition, eugenics education was monitored in Britain by the English Eugenics Society (founded by Galton in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society) and in the United States by the American Eugenics Society.

Following World War I, the United States gained status as a world power. A concomitant fear arose that if the healthy stock of the American people became diluted with socially undesirable traits, the countrys political and economic strength would begin to crumble. The maintenance of world peace by fostering democracy, capitalism, and, at times, eugenics-based schemes was central to the activities of the Internationalists, a group of prominent American leaders in business, education, publishing, and government. One core member of this group, the New York lawyer Madison Grant, aroused considerable pro-eugenic interest through his best-selling book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Beginning in 1920, a series of congressional hearings was held to identify problems that immigrants were causing the United States. As the countrys eugenics expert, Harry Laughlin provided tabulations showing that certain immigrants, particularly those from Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe, were significantly overrepresented in American prisons and institutions for the feebleminded. Further data were construed to suggest that these groups were contributing too many genetically and socially inferior people. Laughlins classification of these individuals included the feebleminded, the insane, the criminalistic, the epileptic, the inebriate, the diseasedincluding those with tuberculosis, leprosy, and syphilisthe blind, the deaf, the deformed, the dependent, chronic recipients of charity, paupers, and neer-do-wells. Racial overtones also pervaded much of the British and American eugenics literature. In 1923 Laughlin was sent by the U.S. secretary of labour as an immigration agent to Europe to investigate the chief emigrant-exporting nations. Laughlin sought to determine the feasibility of a plan whereby every prospective immigrant would be interviewed before embarking to the United States. He provided testimony before Congress that ultimately led to a new immigration law in 1924 that severely restricted the annual immigration of individuals from countries previously claimed to have contributed excessively to the dilution of American good stock.

Immigration control was but one method to control eugenically the reproductive stock of a country. Laughlin appeared at the centre of other U.S. efforts to provide eugenicists greater reproductive control over the nation. He approached state legislators with a model law to control the reproduction of institutionalized populations. By 1920, two years before the publication of Laughlins influential Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (1922), 3,200 individuals across the country were reported to have been involuntarily sterilized. That number tripled by 1929, and by 1938 more than 30,000 people were claimed to have met this fate. More than half of the states adopted Laughlins law, with California, Virginia, and Michigan leading the sterilization campaign. Laughlins efforts secured staunch judicial support in 1927. In the precedent-setting case of Buck v. Bell, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., upheld the Virginia statute and claimed, It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

During the 1930s eugenics gained considerable popular support across the United States. Hygiene courses in public schools and eugenics courses in colleges spread eugenic-minded values to many. A eugenics exhibit titled Pedigree-Study in Man was featured at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 193334. Consistent with the fairs Century of Progress theme, stations were organized around efforts to show how favourable traits in the human population could best be perpetuated. Contrasts were drawn between the emulative presidential Roosevelt family and the degenerate Ishmael family (one of several pseudonymous family names used, the rationale for which was not given). By studying the passage of ancestral traits, fairgoers were urged to adopt the progressive view that responsible individuals should pursue marriage ever mindful of eugenics principles. Booths were set up at county and state fairs promoting fitter families contests, and medals were awarded to eugenically sound families. Drawing again upon long-standing eugenic practices in agriculture, popular eugenic advertisements claimed it was about time that humans received the same attention in the breeding of better babies that had been given to livestock and crops for centuries.

Anti-eugenics sentiment began to appear after 1910 and intensified during the 1930s. Most commonly it was based on religious grounds. For example, the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii condemned reproductive sterilization, though it did not specifically prohibit positive eugenic attempts to amplify the inheritance of beneficial traits. Many Protestant writings sought to reconcile age-old Christian warnings about the heritable sins of the father to pro-eugenic ideals. Indeed, most of the religion-based popular writings of the period supported positive means of improving the physical and moral makeup of humanity.

In the early 1930s Nazi Germany adopted American measures to identify and selectively reduce the presence of those deemed to be socially inferior through involuntary sterilization. A rhetoric of positive eugenics in the building of a master race pervaded Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene) movements. When Germany extended its practices far beyond sterilization in efforts to eliminate the Jewish and other non-Aryan populations, the United States became increasingly concerned over its own support of eugenics. Many scientists, physicians, and political leaders began to denounce the work of the ERO publicly. After considerable reflection, the Carnegie Institution formally closed the ERO at the end of 1939.

During the aftermath of World War II, eugenics became stigmatized such that many individuals who had once hailed it as a science now spoke disparagingly of it as a failed pseudoscience. Eugenics was dropped from organization and publication names. In 1954 Britains Annals of Eugenics was renamed Annals of Human Genetics. In 1972 the American Eugenics Society adopted the less-offensive name Society for the Study of Social Biology. Its publication, once popularly known as the Eugenics Quarterly, had already been renamed Social Biology in 1969.

U.S. Senate hearings in 1973, chaired by Sen. Ted Kennedy, revealed that thousands of U.S. citizens had been sterilized under federally supported programs. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare proposed guidelines encouraging each state to repeal their respective sterilization laws. Other countries, most notably China, continue to support eugenics-directed programs openly in order to ensure the genetic makeup of their future.

Despite the dropping of the term eugenics, eugenic ideas remained prevalent in many issues surrounding human reproduction. Medical genetics, a post-World War II medical specialty, encompasses a wide range of health concerns, from genetic screening and counseling to fetal gene manipulation and the treatment of adults suffering from hereditary disorders. Because certain diseases (e.g., hemophilia and Tay-Sachs disease) are now known to be genetically transmitted, many couples choose to undergo genetic screening, in which they learn the chances that their offspring have of being affected by some combination of their hereditary backgrounds. Couples at risk of passing on genetic defects may opt to remain childless or to adopt children. Furthermore, it is now possible to diagnose certain genetic defects in the unborn. Many couples choose to terminate a pregnancy that involves a genetically disabled offspring. These developments have reinforced the eugenic aim of identifying and eliminating undesirable genetic material.

Counterbalancing this trend, however, has been medical progress that enables victims of many genetic diseases to live fairly normal lives. Direct manipulation of harmful genes is also being studied. If perfected, it could obviate eugenic arguments for restricting reproduction among those who carry harmful genes. Such conflicting innovations have complicated the controversy surrounding what many call the new eugenics. Moreover, suggestions for expanding eugenics programs, which range from the creation of sperm banks for the genetically superior to the potential cloning of human beings, have met with vigorous resistance from the public, which often views such programs as unwarranted interference with nature or as opportunities for abuse by authoritarian regimes.

Applications of the Human Genome Project are often referred to as Brave New World genetics or the new eugenics, in part because they have helped to dramatically increase knowledge of human genetics. In addition, 21st-century technologies such as gene editing, which can potentially be used to treat disease or to alter traits, have further renewed concerns. However, the ethical, legal, and social implications of such tools are monitored much more closely than were early 20th-century eugenics programs. Applications generally are more focused on the reduction of genetic diseases than on improving intelligence.

Still, with or without the use of the term, many eugenics-related concerns are reemerging as a new group of individuals decide how to regulate the application of genetics science and technology. This gene-directed activity, in attempting to improve upon nature, may not be that distant from what Galton implied in 1909 when he described eugenics as the study of agencies, under social control, which may improve or impair future generations.

They were stolen from their homes, locked in chains and taken across an ocean. And for more than 200 years, their blood and sweat would help to build the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever known. But when slavery ended, their welcome was over. America’s wealthy elite had decided it was time for them to disappear and they were not particular about how it might be done. What you are about to see is that the plan these people set in motion 150 years ago is still being carried out today. So don’t think that this is history. It is not. It is happening right here, and it’s happening right now.

You can watch the full length film right here on Maafa21.com. Get an access code sent to your email.

This is the first part of a two part series exploring the relationship between the controversial eugenics movement of the past and modern genetics. Eugenics was dedicated to cleansing and purifying humanity from inferior members with the hope of solving various social problems related to poverty, disability, and illness. To accomplish this, it sought to create a superior race of people and to use forced sterilization and extermination to eliminate future generations of defective human beings. Darwins theory of evolution was used to justify the practice of eugenics. Later, when eugenics fell from favor, modern genetics began to grow up from the ashes of the former movement.

When Adolf Hitler applied Darwins theory of evolution and the principles of eugenics to the goals of the German state, the result was the murder of eleven million men, women and children. These lives were sacrificed in the name of eugenics. Eugenicists were seeking to improve the conditions of life for humanity by creating a superior race of people.

The eugenics movement had a very dark side, which led to social control, loss of reproductive freedom, and the loss of life. Should we be concerned that modern genetic science might have a dark side as well? Will the fruit of genetic research be misused by ill-intentioned people to gain control over others as happened with eugenics in the past? Has modern genetics completely severed itself from its roots? Or, might it become the tool that will be used to try to create a master class of genetically superior human beings in America?

What are the deceptions and dangers of the modern genetics movement? Does true health and true happiness lie in the human genome? Are we really bound to the set of genes that we received from our parents, or can we overcome what we were given? What are the factors that activate or deactivate certain genes, and how can we control the expression of our genetic make-up to promote our health and the health of our children? What are the motivations of certain groups who want us to believe that genes control every aspect of our lives that we have no other options than to suffer while genetic scientists look for genetic cures for all that ails us? Are we really more than our genes or is our genetic code all there is?

These questions and many more will be examined in these articles. Lets begin by learning about the development of eugenics.

The word Eugenics means good genes. Eugenicists believe that principles of Darwins theory regarding the survival of the fittest can be used to support the elimination of weak and undesirable people from society. They believe that human beings are inherently no different than animals, and therefore we can and should be bred like animals. A farmer does not allow deficient cows in his herd to reproduce, and in the same way, eugenicists believe that certain people in our society should control human reproduction.

Simply put, eugenics consists of rational methods for putting evolution on the fast track, so that only the best people will reproduce and become superior beings. It is also the fast track for helping inferior families and inferior groups of people to stop their reproduction and to quickly die out.

Eugenicists believe that natural attraction, affection, and love between men and women should not be the basis upon which procreation should be based. Rather, scientists and the medical system should provide scientific and common sense control over the individuals who should be allowed to mate with one another. People with the best traits should be encouraged to reproduce, and those with defective traits should be prevented from producing children by various methods such as sterilization, segregation, and, if necessary, death.

A steady stream of information has been distributed in every corner of society for over 150 years telling us that defective germplasm, or bad genes, lead to problems of child development, illness, low achievement, alcoholism, and even poverty. We are also told that good genes must be present in order for people to live healthy, prosperous, and happy lives.

The general teaching is that our personal genetic code is the master blueprint that determines nearly everything about us. It determines our intellectual gifts, our artistic gifts, our physical structure, and establishes the parameters through which we will develop certain illnesses and ultimately die. We have been taught that this blueprint is written in stone, and if couples produce children, then their combined genetic material will create a new, unchangeable blueprint for their children. We are also told that the real cure for diseases will come from genetic repairs that are just beyond the horizon of modern science.

Scientists are using techniques of genetic engineering to modify plants and animals (GMOs). We are told that human modification is just around the corner. We are promised that the next step in medicine will be a personal one, where our illnesses will be treated with drugs that have been specifically formulated to match the requirements of our genetics. However, until that time comes, we must continue to rely on existing pharmaceutical drugs.

In short, we are being told that in some cases, there isnt much hope for healing until modern genetics brings us the cure for all that ails us. Thus, some of us and some of our children are doomed to a life of illness and suffering unless we are willing to consider other options.

The Massacre of the Innocents at Bethlehem, by Matteo di Giovanni, 1487. Source.

Some people now believe that if parents decide that they wish to have the life of their child brought to an end before age five, because of disability, illness, inconvenience of the parents, or for any other reason, then the parents should have the right to abort the child. So, if you dont like the color of his hair, the color of her eyes, the developmental delays that you are observing, the illnesses that are making life difficult, or the behaviors that you cannot control, then you should have the right to have your child aborted (legally killed) up to age 5 or 6. [1, 2, 3]

Historically, killing a child after it is born was called infanticide. This is now being given a new name post-birth abortion or after-birth abortion.

Central to this way of thinking is the belief that children are only potential human beings until they reach the age of self-awareness, which is believed to happen around age five. Proponents of post-birth abortion see children as disposable until the child becomes aware of its existence as a person and can begin to develop goals and ambitions for life.

It is believed that prior to age 5, children live in a pre-aware state, and have an animal-like existence, which is just like a chimpanzee, a dog, a chicken, or a pig. Thus, killing a young child because of bad genetic composition is no different than killing a sick dog or a mature pig that is ready to be processed into sausage.

Those who believe in post-birth abortion are challenging American society to reconsider how we value human life. They are observing the fact that we already permit babies in the womb to be killed, we encourage the termination of the lives of animals when they are seriously ill, and most of us approve of slaughtering animals to supply food. Based on this, they ask, Why do we extend special privileges to young children who have the same level of consciousness as animals or babies in the womb? Why do we preserve the lives of defective people who are draining society of its resources?

These groups extend their argument to the elderly as well. If a person with some form of dementia such as Alzheimers is no longer aware of his or her own existence as a human being, can no longer understand his or her medical condition, and is so frail and feebleminded that he or she can no longer contribute anything to society, then they would tell us that the termination of that persons life is no different than euthanizing an animal or aborting a baby in the womb.

The idea that people in authority should have the legal right to terminate the lives of other people in certain circumstances to benefit the greater good of society is not new. These thoughts have a long history, which was part of the original eugenics movement that began in 1859. The human extermination program that was implemented by Adolf Hitler before and during World War II was a prime example of eugenics. He was trying to purify the human race by killing all those who he determined would have an inferior contribution to the human germplasm if they were to reproduce. He and other leaders of the Third Reich believed that only superior human beings should be allowed to reproduce, and the inferior should be eliminated.

The proposal that we legalize the killing of defective children is just the reappearance of old style eugenics with a slightly new twist.

Eugenicists believe that everything about us is determined by genetic composition. Who we are and how we behave is determined almost entirely by our germplasm our personal genetic code.

If we have bad genes, then there is nothing that can be done about the situation. If our genes are seriously defective, then eugenicists would say that sterilization or termination of life is the best solution to the problem. Both of these options would help preserve future generations from inheriting defective germplasm from defective parents.

Eugenicists seek to create a class of people who possess superior attributes such as intelligence, physical strength, and physical appearance. They also seek to discourage reproduction by inferior people.

When techniques of discouragement fail to reduce the birth of new defectives, then forced sterilization of undesirables is pursued under the authority of the state. When sterilization is not practical, then termination of life is used to decrease the surplus population of defectives.

Eugenics historian Edwin Black carefully described the development of the Eugenics movement from the period of time beginning with the work of Charles Darwin in 1859 to our present time. He described the goals of eugenicists and their influence over social policy. His 566 page book records the history of the eugenics movement and shows how eugenics was transformed into modern genetics. The book is filled with quotations in which eugenicists explain their theories and their beliefs in their own words. Here is a taste of what he reported in his book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and Americas Campaign to Create a Master Race. Mr. Black stated:

On May 2 and May 3, 1911, in Palmer, Massachusetts, the research committees of the ABAs [American Breeders Association] eugenic section adopted a resolution creating a special new committee. Resolved: that the chair appoint a committee commissioned to study and report on the best practical means for cutting off the defective germ-plasm of the American population.

Ten groups were eventually identified [by the American Breeders Association] as socially unfit and targeted for elimination. First, the feebleminded; second, the pauper class; third, the inebriate class or alcoholics; fourth, criminals of all descriptions including petty criminals and those jailed for nonpayment of fines; fifth, epileptics; sixth, the insane; seventh, the constitutionally weak class; eighth, those predisposed to specific diseases; ninth, the deformed; tenth, those with defective sense organs, that is, the deaf, blind and mute. In this last category, there was no indication of how severe the defect need be to qualify; no distinction was made between blurry vision or bad hearing and outright blindness or deafness.

Not content to [only] eliminate those deemed unfit by virtue of some malady, transgression, disadvantage or adverse circumstance, the ABA committee targeted their extended families as well. Even if those relatives seemed perfectly normal and were not institutionalized, the breeders considered them equally unfit because they supposedly carried the defective germ-plasm that might crop up in a future generation. The committee carefully weighed the relative value of sterilizing all persons with defective germ-plasm, or just sterilizing only degenerates. The group agreed that defective and potential parents of defectives not in institutions were also unacceptable [to society]. [4]

The notion that certain elite groups should be in charge of cleansing society of defective persons was popular in the United States during the first 45 years of the 20th century. It was only after the full extent of the eugenics program in Nazi Germany was brought to light that eugenicists in the United States began to take a less public position.

When Charles Darwins book The Origin of Species was published in 1859, it provided the perfect theory for those who believed in human breeding. Darwins cousin, Sir Francis Galton of England, applied The Origin of Species to his concerns about the degenerate state of society. Francis Galton believed social problems were caused by defects in human germplasm (genes). He believed that if defective people could be prevented from conceiving and giving birth to children, then problems such as poverty, mental illness, mental retardation, and alcoholism would die out.

Australian researcher and writer Roger Sandall described how Francis Galtons life was transformed by the theory of Darwinian evolution. Roger Sandall wrote:

Coming at a critical stage of both his scientific career and his domestic life, Darwins book shattered Galtons religious beliefs and turned him towards biological research. He always had what he called a hereditary bent of mind, and from 1859 he proceeded to investigate, he said later, matters clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race. [5]

I will summarize a few additional points drawn from Roger Sandalls discussion of Francis Galton and the early eugenics movement. These points are not just the old and moldy views of a long dead eugenicist, but are beliefs that continue to influence the thinking of many people today.

Francis Galton taught his followers that only the genetically perfect should be allowed to reproduce. In his 1873 essay Hereditary Improvement he insists that those of feeble constitution must embrace celibacy lest they should bring beings into existence whose race is predoomed to destruction by the laws of nature.

Galton believed that certain races were superior, and the reproduction of inferior races should be tightly controlled so that only the few best specimens of that race would be allowed to become parents, and only a few of their descendants should be allowed to live.

Galton recommended that his country (England) should be scoured for the names and addresses of gifted people who would be urged to intermarry. This intellectual aristocracy would receive special benefits. Defectives would receive nothing at all. Endowments would be used to maintain a privileged class living in healthy circumstances, which would enable it to multiply in comfort.

Galton declared that the gifted class should treat lower classes with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these lower classes continued to procreate children who are morally, intellectually, and physically inferior, then it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered to be enemies of the state. As such, he believed that they would forfeit all their claims to kindness from the superior class.

When Galton wrote, late in life, that the effect of Darwinism was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science, a radical antinomian spirit was unleashed; and when he declared that eugenics must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion, adding that it has indeed strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, a kind of displaced religious zeal was put at the service of political compulsion: allied to German nationalism, it is unsurprising that it led, step by step, to policies of racial exclusion and finally annihilation. [6]

Proponents of eugenics believe that a pure bloodline should be created that contains only the best traits of humanity. They believe that techniques of good breeding should be used to create a race of super humans who are made in the image of the eugenicists. These super humans will all be highly intelligent, strong, healthy, beautiful, talented, prosperous, motivated, and capable of submitting their will to the will and greater good of society.

Physical appearance is also seen as being important. People will need to have a certain skin color, hair color, eye color, and meet high standards for mental acuity and emotional stability. They also must possess ideal physical strength and physical form (either male or female) in order to have the right to reproduce.

People with a personal or family history of poverty, chronic illness, addiction, disabilities, lack of motivation, minimal intellectual achievement, and non-conformist thinking would be unwelcome in this new society, and would not be allowed to reproduce.

Three Ku Klux Klan members standing at a 1922 parade in Virginia. Image source.

Very few people use the word eugenics today when speaking in public, because it is on the list of politically incorrect words. Despite the positive rhetoric of eugenics, it was a highly racist endeavor, which sought to elevate one race above all others. This will be discussed in detail at a later point in this article.

Even though people no longer openly use the word eugenics, the insidious principles of eugenics can still be observed all around us in 21st century America. Eugenics is insidious, because it destroys life, denies reproductive freedom, destroys the functioning of the family structure, and targets certain classes and races of people for destruction. It does all this while seeking to establish a master race which is intended to dominate the world.

The plans of eugenicists closely follow the principles Darwins theory of evolution, which tells us that the strongest and fittest should overcome and replace the weak and inferior. Eugenicists have determined that they are the fittest and most able people for managing society and it is their responsibility as the superior beings to actively purge the weak and inferior from society. They believed that defective people need to be prevented from reproducing so that the number of defectives in the world will dwindle and fade away, while they, the fittest group of people, are allowed to survive and flourish.

American Inventor and Eugenicist Alexander Graham Bell. Image source.

Historically, the goals of the eugenics movement were to eliminate poverty, disability, numerous chronic illnesses, and human suffering. These lofty goals were designed to provide the greatest amount of happiness to society. On the surface, this sounds good to most people. These goals led many prominent Americans to support the eugenics agenda.

People such as Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw, author H. G. Wells, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, among many others, were very involved in promoting eugenics. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was one of the most zealous participants in the American Eugenics Movement. [7]

College professors were prominent among both the officers and members of various eugenics societies which sprang up in the United States and Europe in the early 20th century. In virtually every college and university, professors were inspired by the new creed of eugenics, and most of the major colleges had credit courses on eugenics. These classes were typically well attended and their content was generally accepted as part of proven science. [8]

Eugenicists believed that the primary determinant of mankinds behavioral nature was genetic, and various environmental reforms designed to improve living conditions, for example, were largely useless. Further, the eugenics movement believed that those who were at the bottom of the social ladder in society, such as the Black race, were in this position not because of social injustice or discrimination, but as a result of their own inferiority. [9]

Carrie Buck sits with her mother, Emma Buck, on the grounds of the Virginia State Colony of Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Madison Heights, near Lynchburg. This photograph was taken in November 1924 by Arthur H. Estabrook, a eugenics researcher who interviewed the two women before testifying in a legal case that resulted in the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck. Source.

In the early 1900s, eugenicists began to use persuasion to gain voluntary cooperation with their new way of thinking about human reproduction. In the United States, the strategy of persuasion was eventually replaced by a strategy of coercion and compulsion.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the State of Virginias sterilization plan in Buck Versus Bell, which affirmed that it had the right to sterilize mentally deficient residents to prevent them from producing more of their kind. This decision opened the door to forced sterilization in many U.S. states.

At that time, eugenicists believed that human character and behavior was almost completely determined by the germplasm. In contemporary language, we would say everything is determined by ones genes. Eugenicists believed that every negative trait they observed in a person could be passed on to their descendants. For example, a person living in poverty is poor because of his genes, and unless sterilization is pursued, that person will create children who are destined for poverty. They admitted that sometimes defective germplasm might not be seen in every child conceived by defectives, but if it was present in one generation, then it will be permanently present in all succeeding generations, and will eventually reappear.

In the Buck vs. Bell decision of May 2, 1927, the United States Supreme Court upheld a Virginia statute that provided for the sterilization of people considered to be genetically unfit. The Courts decision, delivered by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., included the infamous phrase Three generations of imbeciles are enough. Upholding Virginias sterilization statute provided the green light for similar laws in 30 states, under which an estimated 65,000 Americans were sterilized without their own consent or that of a family member. [10]

A broken and twisted mound of emaciated corpses lay strewn in one of three open burial pits at the liberation of Belsen on 15 April 1945. British troops were faced with over 10 000 dead inmates who required immediate burial to halt the spread of typhus and other diseases. Belsen, one of many Nazi concentration camps of the German Third Reich, was used as an instrument of genocide against Jews and those of other nationalities and categories. Image source.

The belief that the state had the right to control human reproduction was taken to the extreme in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Third Reich of Germany extinguished the lives of 6 million Jews, and 5 million other people who were deemed undesirable. Undesirables included Jews (from all levels of society), and people from various other groups. The other groups included outspoken Christians and their pastors who would not submit to Nazi ideology. Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally ill persons, people with low mental functioning, and people who were deaf, blind, crippled, and epileptics were all targeted for extermination. The list of inferiors included all people of Polish ethnicity, people in interracial marriages, and people with dark/African skin color. [11]

For the sake of expediency, extermination of defectives and inferior people was the final solution chosen by Hitler. Forced sterilization of eleven million people was not practical, and it would not remove the influence of such people from society. Extermination, however, would immediately stop reproduction of these people and also would allow their personal resources to be confiscated for the German war effort.

Of course, eugenic programs of the past and genetic programs of the present do not begin with mass scale slaughter of unwanted people as happened in Germany. They are marketed as benevolent programs that are designed to help people be happy and prosperous. They subtly condition people to believe that the Statehas a right to control every aspect of their reproduction for the sake of personal happiness.

This belief is then gradually expanded to show that the government has a similar right to control human reproduction for the sake of creating a happy and prosperous society. It progresses from voluntary programs to involuntary programs from cooperation to mandatory compliance. The techniques of the eugenics movement involve sterilization and death. The objective of preventing reproduction by undesirables was achieved by all means possible.

Each step in the implementation of an eugenics program desensitizes people to the value of human life. It leads people to accept the idea that some people are inferior and others are superior, because of their genetic makeup. It teaches people to give honor to certain people and to submit to a small group of super people who are considered to be the model race. It teaches people to accept sterilization and the killing of the minority to support the needs and goals of the majority. The proposed killing of children up to the age of 5 years old, for example, is an outgrowth of eugenic thinking, because in that mindset there is no hope for the defective children, and the best thing we can do for everyone is to simply eliminate them before they begin to drain society of its precious resources.

First the weakest and most helpless are targeted by eugenicists, and then certain undesirable people, who have bad genes, are marked for destruction. This type of population reduction is called systematic depopulation. Depopulation is also called genocide, which is the killing of large groups of people who share a common trait such as ethnic background or religious affiliation.

Eugenicists also will seek to destroy the family structure in order to accomplish their goals. The value and functioning of the family unit consisting of a husband/father, wife/mother and numerous children will be attacked on every front.

This is necessary to break the emotional bonds that tie family members together, and replace it with zealous allegiance to the state. Commitment to the power of the state must be stronger than love and commitment to family members so that defectives in the family can be sterilized or removed without a struggle.

The End Referring to the end of Catholic influence in the US. Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty 1926. Image Source.

There must also be a breaking of affection and commitment to God. Eugenics is incompatible with true religion. Eugenics and the power of the state must rule over people and not the God of the Bible.

Eugenicists understand that one can only serve one master, and their master must be the god and religion of Darwinian Evolution. The moral absolutes of conservative biblical Christianity stand in direct opposition to Darwins theory of evolution and the full implementation of eugenic techniques.

The belief that life is a gift from God, and should be cherished and preserved, is incompatible with the outworking of eugenics, which seeks to put life under the authority of a superior class of people and under the authority of the state.

Specifically, these are some of the methods that have been used to implement eugenics programs over the past hundred years. Please note how they start with encouragement and voluntary participation, and end up with involuntary means to control and reduce the population.

1. Convince superior human beings to produce more children. The fruit of this strategy would result in a rapid increase in the number of superior people and strengthen the superior bloodline. In Nazi Germany, breeding centers were established to produce large numbers of superior blond blue-eyed children. Most of these children were conceived outside of marriage and fathered by Nazi officers. [12]

2. Encourage inferior human beings to have fewer children, or discourage them from having children altogether. This would shrink undesirable bloodlines and weaken the possible influence on the superior bloodline.

3. Prevent people with certain inferior qualities from marrying superior people. This means to forbid inter-racial marriage, marriage between disabled and non-disabled people, and marriage of superior people with those of undesirable ethnic, religious, or economic position, because they would weaken the bloodline of the superior group.

4. Physically isolate severely deficient people from the greater society by institutionalizing them in the name of providing compassionate care or simply put them into containment camps. This will prevent them from marrying and reproducing.

5. Impose forced sterilization on feebleminded people, criminals, and on other incurable defectives such as alcoholics and paupers, so they cannot pass on their undesirable flaws to another generation.

6. Give people a low cost or no cost opportunity to use contraceptives and/or to choose pre-birth abortion to prevent the birth of disabled children and to prevent babies from being born into poverty.

7. Terminate the lives of defective children and defective elderly adults who are not able to contribute to the greater good of society, or who threaten the economic status of those who have been declared the superior race. Use genetic screening for babies in the womb and abort those who have defective genes.

8. Implement programs that will weaken the reproductive capacity of the population. Vaccines, pesticides, GMO food, highly processed food, antibiotics and other drugs, etc. all are known to have a negative influence on fertility. [13] (Those who are aware of these influences can avoid exposure and protect their fertility.)

9. Implement economic programs that will decrease the buying power of low-income persons, which will place increasing financial pressure on low-income working families, so that they will choose to limit the number of children they produce. [14]

10. Contain or exterminate anyone who resists the use of eugenics and who would threaten the development of the superior human bloodline.

War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. Adolf Hitlers personal physician, 43-year old Karl Brandt. Brandt was also Reich Commissar for Health and Sanitation, and was indicted by the U.S. prosecution with 22 other Nazi doctors. Brandt was found guilty of participating in and consenting to using concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs in horrible medical experiments, supposedly for the benefit of the armed forces. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Image Source.

This question is the key to understanding eugenics. It is also the key for uncovering the deceptions and lies that are used to justify eugenics as a socially advanced way of managing society.

Adolf Hitler and his colleagues decided that it was the Nordic or Aryan bloodlines that were superior to all other bloodlines on the Earth. Thus, Adolf Hitler and others like him were to become the superior bloodline. Those with similar physical characteristics/appearance, emotional functioning, and mental capacities, and those who possessed certain ideological convictions were to become archetypes of humanity. They were to be raised up above all other people and others were to be brought into subjection to them.

Hitler found that the most efficient method of preventing reproduction and discontinuing the negative influence on the Aryan bloodline was to terminate the lives of undesirables. These were the people who threatened the racial superiority of the leaders of the German Third Reich and threatened their economic prosperity and social happiness. Eugenicists always seek to protect their own race, their own ethnic group, their own religion (which is now called Social Darwinism), and their own economic prosperity regardless of the country where they live.

In the view of the German leaders of the Third Reich, even inferiors in their own Aryan race needed to be purged from the bloodline. They saw the Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest in the context of the German war effort. War was a positive force for bloodline purification, not only because it eliminated the weaker races which they were attacking, but also because it weeded out the weaker members of their own Aryan race. Hitler was convinced that the strongest people would survive. Nazi Germany, partly for this reason, openly glorified war because it was an important means of eliminating the less fit of the highest race, a step necessary to upgrade the Aryan race. [16]

U.S. Battleships in Pearl Harbor bombed by Japanese Aircraft. Image source.

While Hitlers eugenic program was in full force, a similar program was underway in Japan. The Japanese were actively involved in building up and maintaining a pure Japanese bloodline. They were influenced by American eugenicists and used many of the same techniques that were being used by Hitler. They were trying to keep the Japanese bloodline pure for the same reasons other eugenicists named. [17]

The eugenics programs of Germany and Japan shared several similarities. Both believed that there was a superior race (bloodline) and that bloodline must be preserved to strengthen the power of the state and to preserve the prosperity of society.

Of course, the Germans and the Japanese differed on the matter of which race was to be superior. They both believed that their respective race deserved, and was destined, to dominate the world. They were in agreement that active steps must be taken by government to purify the population, and to prevent superior pure-blooded people from intermarrying with inferior people groups. However, they obviously were in disagreement about which bloodline was superior. Should it be Oriental/Japanese blood or Caucasian/German blood?

The massive extermination of human life by the Third Reich of Germany cast a dark shadow over eugenics, and people tried to distance themselves from the word eugenics. However, the movement did not die with the death of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Neither did the eugenics movement die when the word eugenics became unfashionable.

There were several decades of transition during which the language of eugenics was transformed into the new language of human genetics.

After the horrors of Hitlers eugenics program were brought to light, eugenicists realized that they needed to change their tactics. In 1947 the remnant board of directors of the American Eugenics Society (AES) unanimously agreed, The time was not right for aggressive eugenic propaganda. Instead, the AES continued quietly soliciting financial grants from such organizations as the Dodge Foundation, the Rockefeller-funded Population Council, and the Draper Fund for the purpose of proliferating genetics as a legitimate study of human heredity. [18]

In 1959, the leaders of the American Eugenics Society understood that reestablishing eugenics was an uphill battle. A draft address written by the president of the American Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborn, confirmed this when he prepared to speak to his Board of Directors. He outlined the future of eugenics, which included an ambitious campaign of behind-the-scenes genetic counseling, birth control, and university-based medical genetic programs. At the same time, President Osborn conceded that the movements history was too scurrilous to gain public support. [19]

Pope Francis likened abortion to Nazi eugenics practiced with white gloves, and said the only real families are those based on marriage between a man and a woman, using uncharacteristically blunt language on two controversial moral issues.

Addressing an Italian family association on Saturday, the pope equated the contemporary termination of pregnancies in response to fetal maladies or defects discovered through prenatal testing to the policies of Hitlers Germany.